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Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

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Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#71
post #63

This is cool. I've been thinking about this for a while. The best way to write high quality web applications is to use compiled languages and minimize the complexity of the infrastructure by using e.g. SQLite instead of PostgreSQL. I hope this trend starts to pick up more steam and become the sane default that everyone just assumes. Instead of the current mess where everyone assumes that it's "normal" to live in this…

SQLite is ok if you don't have much traffic (for example personal blogs), but you can't replace a db like Postgresql with SQLite if you have lot of concurrent traffic.

99% of the internet can use SQLite. Not just "personal blogs".

Just about anything that's not facebook/twitter/google.

I think you underestimate how much load it can handle.

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#72
post #68

I built a forum from scratch once and it is a comical amount of work. The initial CRUD weekend-ware is straight forward. LIMIT/OFFSET for pagination. Throw in some Markdown support. Seems easy enough. But the devil is in all the individual features that make a forum usable. Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you, marking threads that you've posted in, tracking the high watermark per user per t…

> Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you Really? _that_ is complicated? Serious question, do you find it complicated because you're still a beginner, or is there something I'm missing? What language(s) did you use?

I guess it is complicated compared to all the features mentioned before: complicated is not the right term, but extending users sessions with notification/messaging support is probably more code than the rest of the forum combined (in every language).

Suddenly there are a lot of things (on top of user sessions, which most web languages/environments have plug and play solutions for) hitting your database and effecting your caching strategies.

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#73
post #68

I built a forum from scratch once and it is a comical amount of work. The initial CRUD weekend-ware is straight forward. LIMIT/OFFSET for pagination. Throw in some Markdown support. Seems easy enough. But the devil is in all the individual features that make a forum usable. Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you, marking threads that you've posted in, tracking the high watermark per user per t…

> Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you Really? _that_ is complicated? Serious question, do you find it complicated because you're still a beginner, or is there something I'm missing? What language(s) did you use?

This person said only that there is a lot to do, not that it is complicated.

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#74
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UIs on those three should be dialed back (animation, JS), but Discourse is pretty good otherwise. I've looked at all three: * Flarum had nausea-inducing animation, and now it overrides natural scroll behavior. (Please never do that to users.) * NodeBB had some problems when I was using it. If JS is disabled, even the homepage links don't work. Forums should be server-rendered. * Discourse could be improved by rem…

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that something like that exists (and to toot our team's work over the years): I started the project years ago and in the last few have gotten really great support from glebm and some others to get it to the point where it's a really lovely, stable, and fast piece of work. We consider it the best Ruby/Rails-based alternative to Discourse out there (as an aside - wewere…

Interesting. Looks as if you're two people developing it (you and 'glemb', right?). Can I ask is this a startup, or is it a side project? (or something else?) What are your long term goals?

(Your about page says a lot about the forum software & its features, but nothing about who you are or why you're donig this, e.g. vision & goals.)

What about providing hosting? (for people who don't want to / cannot install themselves.) And what about Gmail & FB login, what are your thoughts about supporting that?

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#75
post #68

I built a forum from scratch once and it is a comical amount of work. The initial CRUD weekend-ware is straight forward. LIMIT/OFFSET for pagination. Throw in some Markdown support. Seems easy enough. But the devil is in all the individual features that make a forum usable. Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you, marking threads that you've posted in, tracking the high watermark per user per t…

> Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you Really? _that_ is complicated? Serious question, do you find it complicated because you're still a beginner, or is there something I'm missing? What language(s) did you use?

Well this @mention is a bit more complicated than what one might think. For example: If someone creates a post, without any @mention, then edits it, and adds a @mention — then, do you detect this, when looking at the edits, and send a @mention notification now? And what if s/he edits the post again, and removes the @mention, then, do you remove the notification? Cancel the email if it hasn't been sent yet? And if the email has been sent, and the user clicks the link, and views the post — but the @mentioned user sees no @mention because it was removed, then ... this is not good UX. Should you do something about this? Explain that the @mention got removed? Or just leave the user slightly confused?

Also, do you really want to send an email for a @mention immediately? What if the user who writes the post, keeps editing it, after having saved it? Should you wait for a minute or two, until s/he seems to be done editing it? And then generate the @mention email? Or directly, even if then an early out-of-date version of the post will be included in the email.

What if the @mentioned user is in do-not-disturb mode, then you need to schedule the notification for later.

And what if the @mentioned user is already online and sees the post with the @mention in, diriectly? Then maybe you needn't generate any notification at all. But how do you determine what s/he is reading currently?

There's a lot to think about (more than what I mentioned above) that one might not think about, ... before one starts implementing everything. — And this is just for @mentions. ... Kind of goes on like this, with every small seemingly simple feature you want to add.

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#76
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UIs on those three should be dialed back (animation, JS), but Discourse is pretty good otherwise. I've looked at all three: * Flarum had nausea-inducing animation, and now it overrides natural scroll behavior. (Please never do that to users.) * NodeBB had some problems when I was using it. If JS is disabled, even the homepage links don't work. Forums should be server-rendered. * Discourse could be improved by rem…

Discourse does not run on an Ipad 1. It uses a noticeable amount of memory and cpu on any machine. If it is bad for the first world, it is bad for everyone.

What happens on an iPad? Do you mean memory and CPU on the server or on the client?

I do wish that it were server-rendered by default. SPAs are not ideal for content websites for several reasons. And one shouldn't need a recent browser version to read and participate in the WWW.

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#77

Can I ask what (if any) are your future plans with this? And what's the reason you decided to create it? (only to showcase web 1.0 style forums, or ... other reasons too?) For example are you planning to provide hosting? Continue developing the open source version and add features like spam protection? Google and FB login?

I'd been working on this on-again off-again for a while after reading Dan Luu's post on page bloat[1].

I'll provide hosting if anyone wants it. That said, ease of deployment was a major consideration right from the start. That's why I chose golang over Django/Rails and decided to offer SQLite as an option to support quick deployment for internal / low traffic sites.

[1] https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#78
post #68

I built a forum from scratch once and it is a comical amount of work. The initial CRUD weekend-ware is straight forward. LIMIT/OFFSET for pagination. Throw in some Markdown support. Seems easy enough. But the devil is in all the individual features that make a forum usable. Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you, marking threads that you've posted in, tracking the high watermark per user per t…

> Like getting notified when someone @mentions or replies to you Really? _that_ is complicated? Serious question, do you find it complicated because you're still a beginner, or is there something I'm missing? What language(s) did you use?

A good example of "the devil's in the details" is the decision chart of how Slack decides whether to send a notification for a particular message.

I mean, how complicated could it be, if the user is in the channel and he doesn't have notifications turned off, then send it, it's just a simple nested if statement, right?

But, it turns out that when you map out all of the decision points, it's quite a bit more complicated.

https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#79

So much whitespace in the demo. Real web 1.0 forums can fit way more thread titles on screen ;)

Initially, I thought of adding no style at all, like this blog[1]. But, without a max-width, I found it hard to read. I'd love to hear your suggestions. What content do you think should be put to reduce the whitespace?

[1] https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

Re: Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

#80
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse does not run on an Ipad 1. It uses a noticeable amount of memory and cpu on any machine. If it is bad for the first world, it is bad for everyone.

What happens on an iPad? Do you mean memory and CPU on the server or on the client? I do wish that it were server-rendered by default. SPAs are not ideal for content websites for several reasons. And one shouldn't need a recent browser version to read and participate in the WWW.

Discourse uses too much memory on the client and crashes the browser.

As you said, someone shouldn't need latest gen hardware to use the WWW. I personally don't have a lot of control in what the predominate platforms are on the internet, but I have remarked to myself in my bunker that Discourse is a first world echo chamber because no-one else can run it.

Look at hacker news. It isn't pretty and it has lots of glaring usability problems that are trivial to fix, but it could literally run with Firefox 1.0 on a P3-500 just fine.

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