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Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

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201–210 of 245 posts

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#201
post #189

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

I personally got in contact with nested / tree structured forums before the flat, chronological ones. I remember a discussion around 2000 where the flat model got traction. There are up and downsides to each. Of course this is a pure display issue, there’s no reason one couldn’t switch between both in the same forum. However there’s something about seeing the same thing others see and interacting with that context in…

The issue with having both linear chronological and tree views is that users of either still need to respect the conventions of the other. For linear views it is common to just reply at the end while tree view users will be a lot more tolerant of diverging discussions as those not interested can simply ignore that subtree.

Replying to multiple posts in one comment is also something that tree view discussion boards generally don't support - although it should be possible to do it.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#202
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution. honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust

So why even use Remix? Maybe I misunderstand what it is.

With Remix, you run two two servers:

- Remix server - API server

When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI.

It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off.

If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#203
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the people wishing for forums but not wanting to host, I'm surprised nobody had made a Discord-for-forums. Threaded, not reddit.

I hope not. It would become another closed unindexable ad plastered silo. Check out the fandom wikis for an example of how it would probably look.

If only Fandom wikis were unindexable - then they would not be drowining out community run wikis in search results for games where those still exist.

Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#204
post #185

I haven't been this excited to jump in and post in a community in a while. There's just something so inviting in commenting on a thread knowing that your post will be there, in order, and won't be lost in the noise even if you didn't show up early. I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!

Same. It would have been nice to know that I need approval before writing out my post.

Requiring approval for the first couple of posts from new users is one of the most sensible anti-spam policies. I'd much rather see more of that than the current forced AI training labor favored by most sites.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#206

The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds. I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three diffe…

> special characters required

This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required.

Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#207
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just hand out invites to people on hn who have an email listed.

i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again

Even if it looks like the 2000’s it’s clearly the 20s, where you cannot even post your site on a civilized forum without attracting the trolls…

Anyway, I made a pending account now :)

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#208
post #62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.

I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and on…

Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#209

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

Yeah - if you are old enough to remember the days before StackOverflow, you might remember trying to find answers to (programming-related or other) questions in forums. Where you would have to scroll through pages and pages of more or less (typically less) on-topic replies, and if you were lucky you would find some relevant suggestions, but with no indication if they actually worked for others...

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#210
post #209

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

Yeah - if you are old enough to remember the days before StackOverflow, you might remember trying to find answers to (programming-related or other) questions in forums. Where you would have to scroll through pages and pages of more or less (typically less) on-topic replies, and if you were lucky you would find some relevant suggestions, but with no indication if they actually worked for others...

Classic https://xkcd.com/979/
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