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I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.
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> I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads. [-] should collapse subthreads. Caveat is that the browser doesn't remember which subthreads were collapsed due to no-JS.
Not if each "collapse" link reloads the page and at the same time stores the preference in the backend against your username so that subsequent page loads know what to hide (:
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I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also * Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again? * Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the pa…
> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?
And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish.
Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.
It definitely feels like we're going full circle with the Web and back to its earlier, decentralized, stripped-down past.
I dislike forums which indent successive replies. I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads. The proper way of handling replies is to post them under each other and support quoting.
That's just, like, your opinion man. I prefer HN's indented approach to a typical forum listing where it's just a firehose with quotes. But the best approach is to allow the view to be switched as desired.
So you get a vast amount of low quality replies above the next high-quality reply.
For low volume it works okay because you can manually collapse but for high volume once it starts paging it breaks down and you just get further into the top level comment without properly being able to escape.
Reddit's model of auto-collapsing so you get a mix of threads and top-level replies is much better for picking out the better responses.
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LOL you are so right... so much was lost when we started accepting that page reloads are expensive (T_T)
For 20 years page reloads were expensive. In 1999 I had a cable modem connection that could pull down 2 megabytes per second and ping up and down the west cost well under 50ms. But forum servers were slow . Like, really really slow. When Sites like Reddit finally came to, 15 or so years later, with inline replies, they were a breath of fresh air. Back in 99 Slashdot had massive resources put into making it responsive…
In 1999 I would have been jealous of your internet connection — I still had a 256kbps ISDN line, and there were fast forums even then (but mostly not). I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.
Page reloads only got expensive when we decided that they would do a bunch of other shit besides that.
I love it. And it's telling of modern practices that it's one of the fastest forum I've used in the past few years, you click and the page instantly appears! Do you intend to extend it and keep working on it or was it just a one off project?
"Modern practices make for slow apps" is a common trope on HN, but it's important to note that it's not just modern practices that make modern web apps feel slow; modern feature sets are the larger culprit.
This app could be a React SPA and it would still be faster than most forums you've used because it intentionally has a minimal feature set.
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I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.
I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.
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LOL you are so right... so much was lost when we started accepting that page reloads are expensive (T_T)
For 20 years page reloads were expensive. In 1999 I had a cable modem connection that could pull down 2 megabytes per second and ping up and down the west cost well under 50ms. But forum servers were slow . Like, really really slow. When Sites like Reddit finally came to, 15 or so years later, with inline replies, they were a breath of fresh air. Back in 99 Slashdot had massive resources put into making it responsive…
And yet, once you wait that 100ms or however long it takes for the server to respond, your page is fully loaded and interactive. During the loading process, your browser remains responsive and your CPU is not loaded.
Nowadays, we still wait the same amount of time for the initial load, but now your CPU is at 100% parsing megabytes of shitty Javascript, and once the initial load completes, you're still not guaranteed the page won't slow down/overload your CPU again because some stuff can be asynchronously loaded (supposedly for performance reasons, even though doing it on the backend as part of the initial load would be faster in the vast majority of cases).