Thanks for sharing this. I've been writing my own simple websites for a couple years now and I really like seeing what other people have done. Sometimes I learn better ways to do things, and sometimes I realize what I did was perfectly acceptable.
Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 )
The style is very neat. Mind sharing the source ?
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you love it, so much ? It's probably the stupidest thing ever invented as far as UX goes.
It is possible the gp post just feels neutral about it. There are a whole range of emotions between love and hate.
I do feel neutral/indifferent about it. I was just wondering why I see so much negative sentiment towards it.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#104Earlier 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 makes it impossible to get to the footer.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#105It's absolutely beautiful. Within a fraction of a second, I knew what it was and how to use it and how much value it has.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#106Cool project, is there a theme feature?
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.
I am the developer of HACK, an iOS, android, MacOS client app which provides push notifications for HN when someone replies to your comment or post.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#108It's always nice to hear about someone writing a cool program just because they felt like doing so. Every time I think about writing a forum server, I find I return to the thought that Usenet was better, and that if I wanted a web forum, I'd consider putting a web front end on an NNTP server. That would among other things let people keep using NNTP clients (I like gnus.el) if they don't want to use a browser. There are a bunch of NNTP web clients already, but afaict they all needlessly suck.
You might take a look at Fossil (fossil-scm.org) which is not a forum, but is an all-in-one source control system, bug tracker, wiki, and web backend, all implemented as an SQLite client written in C. Its blurb says a scripting language might sound more attractive than C superficially, but in Fossil, SQLite does all the heavy lifting that would otherwise have been done with scripts. On my bottomless todo list I want to study its implementation sometime, since I think it would be a good example of "advanced" uses of SQL and SQLite. That is completely independent of Fossil's purpose as a VCS application. I'm ok at basic SQL but not so clueful about sophisticated uses.
One thing to watch out for is that since SQLite is an embedded DB, when you make an SQlite query, the overhead is basically a local subroutine call rather than the network traffic that a client/server DB would incur. That in a way changes the asymptotics of an application: particularly, the "N+1 queries" antipattern of some client/server DB apps is a perfectly ok design strategy for SQLite. I believe Fossil may rely on this in some way.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sounds reasonable. I am complaining about infinite scroll on the web. But inside a native app it might be better since there is more precise control of that experience. Assuming the app creator has done a good job.
Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated. Presumably similarly to HackerNews threads, which are paginated.
Yes. Pagination can be bad if the URL indexes by 1-10, 11-20 etc. But I think HN paginates using the post ID, so that the links are permanent (?) which is a better way to do it. Basically the novel idea here is to treat the browser like a REST client.
This also means you need a predictable, deterministic algorithm, like "ORDER BY DATE DESC", but Reddit does have order by popularity, so that will not be idempotent. But now being super picky as order by popularity is pretty useful. Although I think date should be the default. And order by [what cambridge analytica-likes know about me] should be off.