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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

#61

Post by whartung »

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?

Because it’s like swimming across a large lake finding yourself exhausted in the middle with little alternative to swimming back.

Now on my phone it’s relatively easy to jump to the top of the page. It’s also almost done impossible to jump to the bottom.

On a desktop I can at least mash the END key or play silly reindeer games with the scrollbar thumb.

On mobile it’s very hard to Leap or Surge or Jump.

If I’m madly fanning the page with my thumb or, worse, my fingers because I’m tired with my thumb, I pretty much just give up at that point.

I also like having non-endless scrolling because I can use the scroll bar as a gauge of how much is left of the article.

Being constantly fed is just a bad experience.

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

#62

Post by ratww »

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?

Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle.

But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own.

It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.

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

#63

Post by httpete »

eterm wrote: post #45
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN's model is bad for high volume. Sometimes on HN you only get one top level reply on the whole page because once it puts the top top-level reply it then puts all the replies to that above the next top-level reply. 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 a…

I made a reddit-like comment system for HN if you are curious: https://www.hackernewz.com/item/33153152 (link to your comment: https://www.hackernewz.com/item/33153152?commentId=33155112)

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

#64

Post by quickthrower2 »

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?

Terrible user experience. If it infinitely scrolls I can be sure some gesture on the phone will lose my spot and it will take ages to find where I was. Also they rarely play nice with the back button. There is usually a better way to present data.

For reading, do you prefer books or ancient scrolls?

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

#65

Post by ratww »

Semaphor wrote: post #9
make_me_rich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

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.

> Old Reddit

Important distinction.

New Reddit also fell prey to bad development practices and is without exaggeration unusable for me. It often "crashes" and the whole page goes dark-grey on my browser, and this has been happening for at least a year. After reloading I can't see all messages without navigating away, and middle click messes with the scrolling. At this point I will assume they either don't care or are fucking with me.

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

#66

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

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…

I don't buy that for a second to be honest.

Modern forums haven't innovated all that much, you have infinite scrolls, notifications and live updates, that's all that I can think of, off the top of my head. If you go on the main page of a modern forum and a Phpbb one they'll be functionally equivalent for the end user.

And even if they had innovated, you can put as big a feature set as you want on the backend and not send 20Mb of JavaScript along with a single request per post and your page will load instantly.

And that's not even going into all the websites which are entirely featureless, I regularly see SAAS landing pages that take over a minute to fully load, that's just to display text and images.

Maybe the stack is capable of being fast and light theoretically but it never is in practice.

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

#67

Post by ratww »

bmacho wrote: post #11

Teddit works like a charm with disabled javascript, it supports css based thread collapsing, and cookie based information for logged out users as well (you can store which subreddits you follow).

> it supports css based thread collapsing

I didn't knew but I love it... I wish more developers took interest in such things.

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