Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 161 posts

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

#71

Post by protomikron »

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?

It often breaks the builtin Browser-Search.

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

#72

Post by fuzzy2 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #35
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…

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

It’s just the feeling! :-)

vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.

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

#74

Post by jamesmccann »

This is a cool project! One small suggestion: the native blue links for the author name, "thread", and "reply" make the content hard to focus on as the UI is quite intrusive. HN solves this quite well with a colour scheme that has the comment content as the most prominent element in a thread.

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

#75

Post by kitsunesoba »

protomikron wrote: post #71
snek_case wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

It often breaks the builtin Browser-Search.

Which is often followed by attempts to replace browser native Find in Page with a custom implementation that doesn't work as well.

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

#76

Post by gcanyon »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #64
snek_case wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apollo (reddit client on iOS) solves this by having the same gesture undo itself -- tap at the top to scroll to the top of the reddit post, tap again to return to where you were.

I'm not saying your complaint is invalid, just that there are ways of mitigating the issue. And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

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

#77

Post by skilled »

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?

And you love it, so much? It's probably the stupidest thing ever invented as far as UX goes.

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

#78

Post by lolinder »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #66
lolinder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Modern forums haven't innovated all that much...

I'm not comparing modern forums to older forums, I'm comparing both types of forum to OP's minimal forum.

> 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.

You have to distinguish between initial page loads and subsequent interactions. Forums are not typically one-page-and-done websites: you spend a lot of time navigating around the different views.

For this use case, phpBB forums were and are very slow.

I tested out the phpBB demo [0] and compared it with the Discourse demo [1]. The Discourse demo has a slow initial load, but it's quite snappy after you've downloaded the 6.23mb (not 20mb!) of JS and CSS. The phpBB demo seems faster on the initial page load, but it gets pretty painful to navigate as you click around into different sub-forums.

The reason why the OP's no-JS forum can outperform both phpBB and Discourse is primarily that it doesn't do very much work on each user action, not that its stack is inherently superior. The biggest bottleneck in a forum will be the speed of each request-response cycle, not whether the requests return JSON or HTML.

[0] http://www.try-phpbb.com/33x/index.php

[1] https://try.discourse.org/

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

#79

Post by jonnycomputer »

make_me_rich wrote: post #6
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.

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 find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.
Post reply on HN