Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

twincl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 30 posts

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#11

Post by arthurtw »

daveloyall wrote: post #8
daveloyall wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand your desire to use FB to vet user identities. I like the idea of twincl. Keep up the good work! The overlap between the set of people that like twincl and the set of people that don't like facebook may be large. You know what accounts I don't mind linking? These: * https://gitlab.com/u/sebboh * https://github.com/daveloyall/ * https://stackexchange.com/users/2248650/daveloyall * https://plus.google…

It's worth noting that I am permitted more than one Google account, but not more than one Facebook account. ...There MAY be some rule about not having more than one G+ account, right? But, I don't really use that service. It was only included here because it's the only "profile" page I know of for that account.

Exactly. That's why we did not use Google identity service. Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#12

Post by dragonwriter »

arthurtw wrote: post #11
daveloyall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that I am permitted more than one Google account, but not more than one Facebook account. ...There MAY be some rule about not having more than one G+ account, right? But, I don't really use that service. It was only included here because it's the only "profile" page I know of for that account.

Exactly. That's why we did not use Google identity service. Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

> Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

Facebook might claim to, but they don't do much of a job of it.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#13

Post by jerdfelt »

blakeyrat wrote: post #6

> Although rich, interactive contents can be made with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript technologies, most Internet users do not possess related programming skills. Great! Finally someone in the open source forum community designing a UI for the average user! > On twincl.com, a piece of rich content (which we called a twinclet, pronounced as “twink-lit”) is written with a Markdown fenced code block. And... they've failed right o…

I agree. All too often people are surprised by it on Reddit. Whenever someone replies with a number followed by a period (eg "42."), it's always converted into "1." Among other problems (escaping of backslashes, etc)

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#14

Post by pfooti »

blakeyrat wrote: post #6

> Although rich, interactive contents can be made with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript technologies, most Internet users do not possess related programming skills. Great! Finally someone in the open source forum community designing a UI for the average user! > On twincl.com, a piece of rich content (which we called a twinclet, pronounced as “twink-lit”) is written with a Markdown fenced code block. And... they've failed right o…

Yup. I'm working on a sort of forum / collaboration space for my nonprofit (we're within a few months of open-sourcing it), and one of the big reasons we started from scratch is allowing users to work natively with rich text editors.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#15

Post by arthurtw »

CM30 wrote: post #10

It's an interesting concept, but what's stopping people from making this as a plugin for any other forum script? Because nothing in the page seems like it'd be hard to replicate for a good developer (read, someone who's likely coding add ons for existing platforms). Seems like it'd be best just to wait for a version for my existing forum script. Or get someone to program one. The use of markdown is questionable too.…

Forum anonymity (or more precisely, disposable account) is the source of moderation pain and the reason of suboptimal forum content quality. It's one of the main issues I want to address from day 1. If FB account puts a lot of people off, I may consider adopting SMS verification sooner, or change the yearly subscription to a one-time small fee.

It seems Markdown editing is a red flag for broader adoption. I've thought about a dual approach before: allow casual users to edit with GUI, and provide the Markdown editing capability for pro users.

I do not have a fool-proof way to prevent plugin copying. If somehow it's widely copied, it's not a bad thing (to most people), too.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#16

Post by fweespeech »

arthurtw wrote: post #11
daveloyall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that I am permitted more than one Google account, but not more than one Facebook account. ...There MAY be some rule about not having more than one G+ account, right? But, I don't really use that service. It was only included here because it's the only "profile" page I know of for that account.

Exactly. That's why we did not use Google identity service. Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

> Exactly. That's why we did not use Google identity service. Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

Facebook fails hilariously at enforcement of this.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#17

Post by arthurtw »

dragonwriter wrote: post #12
arthurtw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. That's why we did not use Google identity service. Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy.

> Google accounts are disposable, while Facebook enforces one-account-per-person policy. Facebook might claim to, but they don't do much of a job of it.

At least you must be careful when using multiple Facebook accounts from the same computer. It might cause your main Facebook account locked, and take you a while to have Facebook unlock it for you.

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#18

Post by arthurtw »

pfooti wrote: post #14
blakeyrat wrote: post #6

> Although rich, interactive contents can be made with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript technologies, most Internet users do not possess related programming skills. Great! Finally someone in the open source forum community designing a UI for the average user! > On twincl.com, a piece of rich content (which we called a twinclet, pronounced as “twink-lit”) is written with a Markdown fenced code block. And... they've failed right o…

Yup. I'm working on a sort of forum / collaboration space for my nonprofit (we're within a few months of open-sourcing it), and one of the big reasons we started from scratch is allowing users to work natively with rich text editors.

Didn't you use existing rich text editors like TinyMCE or CKEditor?

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#19

Post by CM30 »

arthurtw wrote: post #15
CM30 wrote: post #10

It's an interesting concept, but what's stopping people from making this as a plugin for any other forum script? Because nothing in the page seems like it'd be hard to replicate for a good developer (read, someone who's likely coding add ons for existing platforms). Seems like it'd be best just to wait for a version for my existing forum script. Or get someone to program one. The use of markdown is questionable too.…

Forum anonymity (or more precisely, disposable account) is the source of moderation pain and the reason of suboptimal forum content quality. It's one of the main issues I want to address from day 1. If FB account puts a lot of people off, I may consider adopting SMS verification sooner, or change the yearly subscription to a one-time small fee. It seems Markdown editing is a red flag for broader adoption. I've though…

As someone who's run a ton of forums, I disagree it's the source of suboptimal forum content quality. If I had forced real names and identities, I would have lost a significant amount of users and activity. And not just trolls and spammers either.

A lot of people like to keep identities separate. Any system that tries to remove the anonymity site of things will end up stifling quite a few people who worry about their personal information being misused or who don't want everyone to know about their every activity online. That's not a bad thing, especially not in a world where intelligence agencies want to spy on everything you do, you could lose your job because of some comments on Facebook or Twitter and being swatted is sadly quite common.

Not everyone wants their friends and family to know they're an active member on say, Donald Trump Fan Forums. Or that they're posted leaked content from an upcoming game, like quite a few people on 4chan or Reddit. Or that they're interested in setting up a Tor node.

As for markdown, yeah, your solution there is exactly the solution. A GUI for new users, a raw editing text box for pro users. It's like how a lot of forum editors switch between BB code/raw text and a WYSIWYG editor.

Plugin copying is a good thing here (because the features mentioned could be good in other scripts), but I'm just warning you'll need quite a bit more if you want to differentiate themself enough from competitors in the market (of which there are thousands).

Re: Show HN: Twincl – A New Attempt at “Rich Forum”

#20

Post by blakeyrat »

arthurtw wrote: post #9
blakeyrat wrote: post #6

> Although rich, interactive contents can be made with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript technologies, most Internet users do not possess related programming skills. Great! Finally someone in the open source forum community designing a UI for the average user! > On twincl.com, a piece of rich content (which we called a twinclet, pronounced as “twink-lit”) is written with a Markdown fenced code block. And... they've failed right o…

Maybe you are right. But Reddit uses Markdown, too, and people seem OK with that? Most redditors are not developers.

People seem ok with a lot of awful things. I don't see that as an argument for Markdown.

The question is: has Reddit (or other Markdown users) actually studied Markdown's usability? Even a basic comparative study against a WYSIWYG equivalent?

It seems like "techy" people just kind of assume Markdown is great and easy and awesome without ever bothering to actually make any effort to question that assumption. That's really the part that bugs me most.

And the entire pitch of Markdown is that you can style your text the way you did back when you were using text-only stuff. Ok. So _this should be underlined, then_. And /this should be in italics, right?/ And naturally this is boldfaced. Oh wait. Markdown is ZERO FOR THREE.

(Strangely, Markdown doesn't even have underline. Go figure. It's not even remotely close to feature-parity with the WYSIWYG textboxes we were all using on the web in 2008.)

Post reply on HN