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Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

hackerforums.co

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#61

Nice job. I've actually been looking for more places to hang out with the HN crowd. I'm not sure about this approach though. Forums are too centralized and don't feel interactive enough. I'd much rather see a HN community on Matrix or something similar.

What about a Discord server?

Discord is an interesting idea, though I am not a fan of them retaining all messages forever.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#62

Nice job. I've actually been looking for more places to hang out with the HN crowd. I'm not sure about this approach though. Forums are too centralized and don't feel interactive enough. I'd much rather see a HN community on Matrix or something similar.

What about a Discord server?

Don't you think many HN posters will object to using a chat service with a fishy as-of-yet probably-not-profitable business model and a big ol' database of all the messages sent? Discord is a great service for now, but it's unclear to me what their plans are in terms of monetization and user privacy.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#64
post #31

> must contain letters in mixed case, must contain numbers and must contain symbols Please don't do this. Have a minimum length, but don't force me to miss it up. My password manager shouldn't have to try multiple times to generate matching passphrase.

> Please don't do this. They didn't, they just chose off the shelf PHP forum software written by idiots that does this and a million other stupid things.

I couldn’t imagine releasing a forum for the hn community that wasn’t also a neat software project. Using phpbb seems like the antithesis of something this community would appreciate, other than perhaps for the practicality of choosing something common.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#65
post #29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is happening because you are running PHP 7.2. In that file $this->extra_headers is initialized as non-countable NULL. Basically phpBB needs to update their code base to support newer versions of PHP. A quick fix would be to change "var ... $extra_headers" at the top of the file to "protected $extra_headers = [];".

A quicker fix for a brand new forum would be to not use some janky old PHP codebase.

dchuk has put their money where their mouth is and have made their own decisions wrt platform as is their right.

Put up or shutup.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#66
Well, I just signed up. Not sure if I'll be active here, but I always like to support forums over social media sites and other corporate silos.

That said, if I can give you a bit of advice:

Change that captcha on the registration page. It's really annoying to decipher, and likely doesn't do all that much to stop bots.

Instead, get a few questions and answers set up, and make them forum specific. Like, what startup aggregator is Hacker News associated with? What's FANG mean? What language are the frameworks React, Vue and Angular written in?

In other words, stuff a dedicated community member would know/could easily look up, but which a bot might not want to bother with.

That's much better to stop spam, and less annoying than figuring out what letters and numbers are in a captcha.

Still, hope the forum works out well!

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sent feedback to a couple dozen sites over this. Most were government website (internal military sites are the worst) but when various financial institutions started updating their policies they forcing this silliness. When they don't allow spaces in passwords either, I worry.

Keep in mind, there are situations where the website you're using is interfacing to backend systems that have constraints that can't easily be changed (colloquially known as "legacy systems"). Feedback is good, but change takes time.

Passwords should be hashed client-side anyway, so the real issue there is how to encode the password hash in a way that satisfies the legacy system. But this is usually plausible, e.g. by base64 or hex encoding the hash to avoid disallowed characters and then appending specific characters that satisfy the set of required characters.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#68
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind, there are situations where the website you're using is interfacing to backend systems that have constraints that can't easily be changed (colloquially known as "legacy systems"). Feedback is good, but change takes time.

Passwords should be hashed client-side anyway, so the real issue there is how to encode the password hash in a way that satisfies the legacy system. But this is usually plausible, e.g. by base64 or hex encoding the hash to avoid disallowed characters and then appending specific characters that satisfy the set of required characters.

Do you know of any systems that actually do this? It's the first I've heard of this technique.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#69
post #66

Well, I just signed up. Not sure if I'll be active here, but I always like to support forums over social media sites and other corporate silos. That said, if I can give you a bit of advice: Change that captcha on the registration page. It's really annoying to decipher, and likely doesn't do all that much to stop bots. Instead, get a few questions and answers set up, and make them forum specific. Like, what startup ag…

Thanks for signing up and thanks for the feedback! I agree that that captcha sucks, but it's the default so I left it for now. I'll add all this to my todo list!

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#70

Nice idea. The biggest hurdle with starting a community site is getting the initial users and maintaining a level of activity that keeps bringing back users to the site. If activity slows down a little, you will find that traffic decreases proportionally. How do you plan to solve the chicken and egg problem? After the initial launch, what's the plan to get your site in front of potential users? I am working on a some…

Well, there are quite a few ways you can solve this issue. Namely:

1. Fake it, like on Reddit. Setup a bunch of fake users and create a ton of topics until activity really kicks in.

2. Do exchanges and deals on forum promotion and community management sites. For example, you can ask the people on Forum Promotion for exchanges, where you do five posts on their site in exchange for five posts on yours or what not.

3. Pay some sort of service for content.

One or more of those could work for this site.

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