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Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

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Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#61
post #11

I've been idling in #hn on freenode for years now, and sadly it's consistently been dead, activity wise. Eager to see if hnchat can change the game.

Come over to #startups We are an international bunch of tech entrepreneurs and the channel is usually pretty active.

This was the most useful comment in this thread. Am now on #startups.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#63
post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I usually find that the images that users use on forums, especially when they are somewhat odd-looking, really reinforces who is saying what.

Maybe there is some scope for taking distinctive glyphicons from a project like Bootstrap and displaying it next to the username. And combine this with your color scheme, I think it might become easier to keep track of threads. Although, some people may not like the icon associated to them.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#64
post #46
post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I like the idea, although I'd probably choose a palette of, say, 30 colors, and hash the username mod 30 to determine the color. That way all the colors should be sufficiently contrasty.

I'd probably try to convert the RGB to HSV and then sanitize the values a bit. Get rid of too flashy or too unsaturated colors.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#65
post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I do something similar but different..

I take a long sequence of random numbers, using only digits 1-8, like

      29834572498741387972573179875938893507418675309
Let's say that goes on for 105 places. Each user then gets an auto-increment ID that I mod 100 (divide by 100 and take the remainder) and add one. I start at that index of the long sequence of digits, and take six characters. If your ID was 112, mod 100 would be 12, plus 1 is 13. Starting at the 13th character, I take six characters: 413879. Then prefix with # - #413879 - and you have a pseudo-random hex code, with neighboring colors being pleasantly visually related.

If it's a dark background, I use letters A-F instead.

If the contrast is insufficient, I'll change a character in the sequence here and there, but it's a lot faster than calculating a new color for everyone, and while everyone doesn't get a unique color, my opinion is that color isn't what makes them unique, it's their username; the color is an extra hint for those able to see it.

EDIT: I called this, when I came up with it a very long time ago, the "sliding doors" technique. I'm sure I'm not the first to do something like that, and it was before the similarly named (abut unrelated, functionally) image replacement trick was popular.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#67
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC isn't everywhere. Even a large channel like freenode's #node.js has maybe 15 regulars, myself included. Meanwhile, Elm's Slack channel has more regulars than #node.js. IRC is kept alive by a small holdout. I'm one of those people, but it's no mystery to me why nobody else uses it when I'm paying irccloud.com or running weechat-ncurses on a VPS just for basic features everyone expects from a communication tool.

#python and #ubuntu are heavily filled on freenode with over a thousand users though? As well as #debian and #go-nuts (for Go) I think IRC is plenty popular, now if the vast majority idle is another story, people are from all around the globe.

Over a thousand users; I wouldn't consider that popular. There are 6 times more people dying every hour than total number of users in those channels. And many of those probably overlap.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#68

App version for android: http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.arm.apk I'm making a website tool to convert website to Android apps, so was using this as a test. If anyone got an x86 android device, I also generated x86 version of the app: http://forty7.org/tmp/hnapp/hnchat.app.x86.apk

The x86 version works well, but isn't 70MB too much for such an application?

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#70

    Forbidden (403)

    CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

    You are seeing this message because this HTTPS site requires 
    a 'Referer header' to be sent by your Web browser, but none 
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Erm...
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