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Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

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Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#51

Post by GoblinSlayer »

lolinder wrote: post #48
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #40

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?

> 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! "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…

Feature set is absolutely design practice.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#52

Post by com2kid »

Nextgrid wrote: post #50
com2kid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> just a short time ago, web servers took more than 100ms to respond to a connection 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…

> 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).

The new reddit site is fast. Yes initial load time is like 2 seconds, but after that, everything else is instant. Click comments, escape out, go back to feed, load comments of a different story, it is quick.

Yes crappy JS abounds everywhere, NYT is an offender recently (they used to be good!), lots of sites suck in this regard, but when modern web dev is done well, it works really well.

Though having read the Reddit engineering blog posts, they throw a ton of resources at ensuring Reddit is fast.

Meanwhile, Ars Technica loads things almost instantly, but for the last year or two (!!) their article pages have leaked memory and CPU, eventually taking up all my CPU and gigs of memory.

Not sure how even. Great load times, responsive site, keep that background tab open and watch the CPU start to melt down.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#53

Post by com2kid »

veidr wrote: post #47
com2kid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”. 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 expe…

> Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”.

100ms is noticeable, 500ms is bad.

The old dial up BBSs may have been slow enough that you could watch character appear, but they were responsive! Those characters started printing right after your keypress happened. Of course it helped that it was likely a local phone call.

I imagine HN ever had a 500ms response rate, the engineers behind it would consider it a failure!

(Even reddit is under 500ms for many operations, and it is super heavyweight)

> 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.

Yeah Perl didn't help the 90s web at all. It made stuff possible, but wow, the performance was bad.

Then again web server software design back then was also a long ways away from what we know to do now.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#54

Post by snek_case »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #18
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

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.

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…

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#55

Post by donio »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #25
barefeg wrote: post #21

Out of curiously, does HN use JS heavily? It feels quite lightweight, and it’s sort of a forum

Very sparingly: https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js I'm pretty okay with that, my only complaint is that when you vote a comment or story it creates an invisible image with a voting URL, which may be loaded much later so the click may not register from time to time.

And all of it is optional. You can do all operations (readinig, posting, commenting, voting, flagging) with JS disabled, you just get page loads rather than dynamic updates.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#58

Post by have_faith »

veidr wrote: post #23
have_faith wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (:

LOL you are so right... so much was lost when we started accepting that page reloads are expensive (T_T)

It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion but page reloads are pretty fast these days with http/2. Maybe there's ways of submitting a form in the background for the same effect, no reload needed! now we're surfing.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#59

Post by paulryanrogers »

snek_case wrote: post #54
fuzzy2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

Impossible to jump pages, know how much there is, often breaks native scrolling in awkward ways without recourse.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#60

Post by luispauloml »

snek_case wrote: post #54
fuzzy2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

Someone posted this on HN last month and I think it summarizes very well what people dislike the most about infinite scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617
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