171–180 of 698 posts
Mailing lists are a great option as far as async comms go, but maybe are a little intimidating for laymen for whatever reason. Other than that, they're well trodden and Google Groups is still pretty solid, although the lack of categories (other than just a ton of different mailing lists, which an option)
The issue of highlighting/indexing important messages and series of messages has come up recently and it's something I want to focus on in the near future.
While not specifically designed as forum software, I would be curious to learn if it could solve some of the issues people have brought up regarding searchability, indexing, and displaying more long-lived content.
Posted a recent dev update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750996
PS If you'd like to work on something like this drop me a line.
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sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than verifying identity
Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative other than "impersonate someone else".
Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…
I love synchronous communication sometimes. Specially if you're a builder it's invaluable to have the person right there and ask them as many questions as you want. Not having any latency in each back and forth increases the efficiency by orders of magnitude.
As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game. The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today. We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been car…
On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though) https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
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I constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Sa…
Yep, the latest example was my credit card company rejecting my GV number. They easily have the means to see that I've been using it for 10+ years and it's definitely me. Luckily they wanted my business more than they cared about that policy; a CS droid was able to "force" the system to allow it. Requiring cell phone numbers isn't about anti-spam or 2FA or anything else these services and sites claim. It's about link…
Yeah, this can't be emphasized enough. Phone numbers are established as universal identifiers. Discord is sitting on a giant heap of personal information including DMs from millions of young people. It is all centralized, both in terms of data, and in terms of accounts (instead of them having to correlate an account between multiple forums, most of which volunteer run and they don't turn over non-public data for money), and also associated with phone numbers. Making multiple accounts for different areas of life is made hard. Beautiful for whoever has access to the data.
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sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than verifying identity
Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative other than "impersonate someone else".
An effective verification system usually involves money at the root; verification in the style of phone verification works using proof of ownership of a limited resource, and most limited resources cost money (phone numbers, IPv4 addresses, etc).
In the real world this is analogous to charging money for access to an event purely in order to ensure it's not overrun with attendees,improving the experience for people who care enough to pay to get in. There are similar downsides to this; people who don't have money are left out.
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Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative other than "impersonate someone else".
Why not? It still limits bot creation (same number can only be used every 6 months). They don't actually want to know if the number belongs to you. Not much different than using a burner number.