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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

#121

Post by svnpenn »

lolinder wrote: post #78
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's quite snappy after you've downloaded the 6.23mb (not 20mb!) of JS and CSS

The pbpBB page you linked downloads 330 KB. Or you can disable JavaScript (and the page still works), and it only downloads 156 KB.

Discourse sucks.

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

#122

Post by julianlam »

I haven't seen representatives from Discourse, Flarum, Vanilla, or the like chime in yet, but as the founder of NodeBB, I want to say this is just awesome!

I'm absolutely loving the fact that the HN zeitgeist has come around to embracing these no-js solutions focusing on function over form.

Every once in awhile I come across little sparks in the forum space, but they all fizzle out for one simple reason: building a forum software isn't as easy as you think it is.

For us, it took three developers a year apiece of full-time work to reach rough feature parity with our competitors, and we're still trying to innovate nearly a decade in (and add in the constant need for reducing technical debt, etc.)

For now I will say what I always say when I see new competitors in the forum space — give me a run for my money. Keep me on my toes! I appreciate the challenge, and it gives me that extra incentive to make our software the best it can be.

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

#124

Post by nieve »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #108

It'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 a…

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 messages a day I'm reminded that I could have had real kill files and proper tracking of new messages. Even close to 30 years later I haven't found anything as efficient for forums & such as a good newsreader was for netnews.

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

#125

Post by bee_rider »

snek_case wrote: post #103
diab0lic wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel vaguely-neutral/negative toward it. It plays somewhat annoyingly with things like bookmarking (mitigated slightly by the fact that infinite scrolls are usually generated content anyway so bookmarking them is probably meaningless) and are trying to tempt the user into endless scrolling (but I guess it is our responsibility to resist the temptation there).

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

#127

Post by aabbcc1241 »

httpete wrote: post #63
eterm wrote: post #45

Earlier 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 )

It seems you only show top 3 levels by default, then allow manual toggle to show/hide nested replies?

Also for long list of replies, you also only show first few.

This design may helps "smaller comments" to surface when the conversation is relatively "mature".

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

#128

Post by llanowarelves »

anta40 wrote: post #126
llanowarelves wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they using?

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Thank you. I just found it now on my own on desktop via their "About this forum" footer link, wasn't obvious to me when I quickly glanced at it on mobile earlier.

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

#129

Post by dmitriid »

IshKebab wrote: post #91
dmitriid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other. But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion. Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now. [1] E…

Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.

It looks like a regular flat forum with a thread display just bolted on top of the page where clicking a post in the thread just dumps you in the middle of a flat discussion

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

#130

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #18
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.

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…

Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style.

Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.

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