Live data from Hacker News

8 days. 8,000 forums

moot.it

11–20 of 72 posts

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#12
I don't believe in forums as a SaaS.

Wordpress growth, in a sense, it is because it is open source. You can have your own version, and also, if you prefer, they can host your blog.

A forums is a different kind of service, takes a lot of time and effort to build a community, and if this guys dissapear in 2 or 3 months, years, etc, it is a big loss.

I prefer the path that Discourse is taking. It's software is open source & they are experts in hosting it. Like wordpress. So, if my community finally is growing, I can think on host everything by myself.

Also, I love redis, I use it a lot, but don't understand why it is a key driver to explain the product proposition.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#13
Are there any active forums besides the main moot.it/forum? I tried going to relatively common keywords and most are just people kinda squatting on them during the initial landgrab.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#14
post #8

It is really snappy and nice, however I still don't understand why there isn't nested threads. It's such a pain trying to navigate around trying to figure out what is in reply to what.

Moot has a concept of "paths" which allow you to setup unlimited discussion hierarchies. All parent paths contain all the moots from the children. We're putting together more docs to help cover these concepts soon! Single thread (which we call a moot) doesn't support threading. If you try to browse bigger threads here in HN or in Reddit you'll soon realize that you'll get lost. Especially when you come back to the si…

> If you try to browse bigger threads here in HN or in Reddit you'll soon realize that you'll get lost.

That never happens to me, especially on reddit, where threads are collapsible. How do you end up lost?

> Especially when you come back to the site it's impossible to know what has changed.

No it's not. There's a reddit gold feature for that.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#15

I think there is a massive market for an open source version of a service like this or disqus. An admin panel for management, and a embeddable javascript app in pages. I wonder if www.discourse.org will ever look at making an embeddable js component.

Whenever you say, "I think there is a massive market", you don't follow up with "for an open source version" haha. :)

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#16
I really like the features offered (especially the realtime updates), and how you can customise it. Would prefer to host it on my own website though.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#17
A free service with no advertising and a very limited business model?

I fail to see why anybody would want to build a community on a service that will disappear in a few months.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#18

I don't believe in forums as a SaaS. Wordpress growth, in a sense, it is because it is open source. You can have your own version, and also, if you prefer, they can host your blog. A forums is a different kind of service, takes a lot of time and effort to build a community, and if this guys dissapear in 2 or 3 months, years, etc, it is a big loss. I prefer the path that Discourse is taking. It's software is open sour…

We just blogged something about infrastructure where Redis plays a key role. It has nothing to do with our product proposition. Expect to see various topics about design and technology.

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#19
post #17

A free service with no advertising and a very limited business model? I fail to see why anybody would want to build a community on a service that will disappear in a few months.

We're going to have paid features such as single sign on or private posts on top of our core offering. You can read more about our plans here

http://moot.it/about/

Re: 8 days. 8,000 forums

#20
post #5
post #2

One of the reasons I really like Google Groups is that it lets me treat something as a mailing list. By and large, I want to use an email client for serious discussions, not a 'forum' thing. Adding this functionality would be super cool.

Moot is primarly meant for websites and the goal is to keep discussion and the users on the site. This will make users come back and potentia.ly increase traffic on the site. We're launching email notifications next week.

> the goal is to keep discussion and the users on the site. This will make users come back

Back when I first got online and only had one forum I was interested in, this was true - but it really doesn't scale. Trying to keep up with even 3 active forums by visiting each in turn is painful. Since then, I've pretty much ignored any information source that doesn't have either RSS or email feeds, since I can multiplex hundreds of those with no problem :P

(For a more average-joe version of this, note how facebook has largely replaced independent forums and IRC - people are lazy, and going out of their way to check an external site on a daily basis is much more work than clicking a "like" button and having that site's news become part of their standard routine)

Post reply on HN