12 ms·

Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

175 points by dchuk 8y ago

dchuk 8y ago
This site was borne of the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138 (Specifically this part of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17071224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17071224) I spun up an instance of phpBB (trying to keep costs down) and customized a ThemeForest theme to make it not ugly. I'll post a thread today that lists all of my notes from the setup process of the site for anyone interested. I'm a huge fan of the bulletin board/flat forum model of communication, so I'm hoping this site can blossom into a community of high quality folks having high quality conversations. EDIT: Also, this is my first foray into setting up and using phpBB, so please let me know if I need to adjust anything. I tried to keep most settings at the default because I assumed that made more sense than me tickering, but I'm all ears if things are weird.
- mongol 8y ago
  I am thinking of starting a forum myself. How did you go about selecting phpBB of all options? I have mostly looked at nodeBB but have not taken any practical steps yet.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    It's dead simple to setup, and very cheap to host. Plus I found some decent themes for it that were easy to tweak. Overall though, nodeBB looks really nice, so go for it!
    - Can_Not 8y ago
      Note on NodeBB's QA process: https://github.com/nodebb/nodebb/issues/4600 https://github.com/nodebb/nodebb/issues/4600 I would love to be corrected in this, (and in fact I'm prototyping a NodeJS+NuxtJS+VueJS forum on the weekends, but don't expect a release this year) but I think you're better off sticking with the PHP variety of forums. I think that's where maturity, stability, and extensions ecosystem shine.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Nice man, reminds me of a forum we used to visit ;-)
  - dchuk 8y ago
    ;)
  - Jake232 8y ago
    I miss those days ;)
- lgregg 8y ago
  that is a throwback, starting a phpBB forum was one of my first forays into the web back in 2001.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Nice!
- ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
  Nice, I'm in.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Welcome!
greggyb 8y ago
I've already registered. I'm super hopeful that this grows into a real forum community for extended discussions. I, like many other posters in the inspiration thread, used to have a number of forums I frequented which mostly died off between the rise of Facebook and Reddit. I'm a fan of the conversation format, and I hope enough others are as well (:
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thanks for signing up! I have the same hope, let's see how it goes.
Jake232 8y ago
Cool idea. HN can get a little annoying / slightly unwieldy when threads get large. A forum is a much better format IMO.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thanks and agreed! Good seeing ya post here btw
sevensor 8y ago
Neat idea. I generally like HN, but it's definitely not a hangout spot. Discouraging idle chatter cuts both ways.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Agreed, and thank you! Come join us! Another major upside to forums is the ability to easily directly connect to folks. I've made many friends that way over the years in various forums, and business partners.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    Registered.
danmg 8y ago
Nice idea, but I have a feeling that 'Hangout' will turn into 'brigade things we like/don't like' aka Reddit.
- dchuk 8y ago
  How so?
  - danmg 8y ago
    That's how it usually goes with a side channel used to discuss another communications channel. E.g., "Can you believe this trash got on the front page!" everyone proceeds to downvote or "hey my show hn is up!" everyone upvotes.
    - dchuk 8y ago
      Hmm, that is certainly possible. Hopefully instead it can just be folks who are looking for a different type of interaction that a flat forum provides over something like this site. Worth a shot at least.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That's what was going on on the IRC channel as well at some point.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ploggingdev 8y ago
Nice idea. The biggest hurdle with starting a community site is getting the initial users and maintaining a level of activity that keeps bringing back users to the site. If activity slows down a little, you will find that traffic decreases proportionally. How do you plan to solve the chicken and egg problem? After the initial launch, what's the plan to get your site in front of potential users? I am working on a somewhat related idea : a site like reddit, but which also has a chat room for each subreddit/topic + public moderation logs among other features. I launched with only the chat rooms part of it and I faced the issues mentioned above, so I'm interested in hearing about your approach. Good luck!
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thanks. Totally agreed that forums (and communities in general) have the cold start problem, and there's no real good solution for it. I do have some ideas though. 1) I'm interested in whipping up a simple phpBB mod that enables Link posts (like here on HN). That will help with the News posting aspect of the community. Thread here: https://hackerforums.co/the-lounge-f3/idea-extension-for-phpbb-that-allows-users-to-subm-t6.html https://hackerforums.co/the-lounge-f3/idea-extension-for-php... 2) I'm going to write up a fairly detailed thread later today that explains in more detail the Why of setting up the site, and the How I did it (literal technical details for those interested). I'll post that here and on Reddit and a few other places to hopefully get some exposure. Cool kids call that "traffic leaking" where you get valuable content in front of active communities, so might drive some traffic. 3) I'm debating setting up a contest of sorts, where members can earn a special badge/title by actively participating in the forum. So for example, start 10 threads and post 25 replies in threads and earn a special badge on your account for eternity. Silly, sure, but could be a simple fire starter. But yeah, overall, it's a challenging thing to do, and I've failed at it a few times over the years in trying to start forums. I still really love them though, so I wanted to try it again. BTW: Post your project here! :) https://hackerforums.co/show-hf-f7/ https://hackerforums.co/show-hf-f7/
- matte_black 8y ago
  The way to solve the chicken and egg problem is through paid posters. If you hire an initial group of people to post content and reply to new users eventually visitors who come on board will see the buzz and participate. Then you can phase out paid posters when you no longer need them. Pretty easy.
jwong_ 8y ago
After registering, I'm seeing this: [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions_messenger.php on line 506: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable Probably best to turn off debugging statements.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Hmm, interesting. I'll take a look, thanks for letting me know. Just so I'm clear, this happened immediately after registering? Or did you do anything else that triggered this?
  - Washuu 8y ago
    That is happening because you are running PHP 7.2. In that file $this->extra_headers is initialized as non-countable NULL. Basically phpBB needs to update their code base to support newer versions of PHP. A quick fix would be to change "var ... $extra_headers" at the top of the file to "protected $extra_headers = [];".
    - Jake232 8y ago
      It's probably a safe assumption that they use a similar style elsewhere though, so probably better to just change PHP version rather than edit the source files? I could be wrong, (I'm a Python guy - not PHP), just seems a safe assumption that it's likely not the only spot.
      - krapp 8y ago
        > so probably better to just change PHP version rather than edit the source files? NO. It's better to improve the code than roll back to an older and less secure version of the language. This is PHP we're talking about, after all.
      - grandpoobah 8y ago
        I agree with your logic. Best to just do what jwong_ said and disable warnings.
gnicholas 8y ago
I like this idea because HN mods (reasonably) discourage certain types of discussions as off-topic. But I'm actually interested to know what HNers think about various topics that may be deemed off-topic by mods. Looking forward to joining your community!
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thank you! I'm not quite sure how we'll deal with off topic stuff, I personally think it's fine as long as it's in an official off topic/general area. We'll see how it goes!
- VoodooJuJu 8y ago
  I agree, particularly when it comes to political discourse. HN is one of the most intelligent places on the internet and I think it'd be very enlightening to hear what such great minds have to say about political topics.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Join us! Bring it on!
jasonvorhe 8y ago
> must contain letters in mixed case, must contain numbers and must contain symbols Please don't do this. Have a minimum length, but don't force me to miss it up. My password manager shouldn't have to try multiple times to generate matching passphrase.
- shiado 8y ago
  Yeah this is annoying. Simply consider a^b, what makes that expression grow faster, increasing a, or increasing b? b is better mathematically and for mental overhead.
  - zawerf 8y ago
    The mathematical part was not obvious to me, so: The derivative with respect to a is: b(a^(b-1)). The derivative with respect to b is: log(a)(a^b) or (a log(a))(a^(b-1)). So it's better to increase b when alog(a) > b. Which is typically the case where a is 26 for lowercased letters and b is like 10 for password length. This analysis might not be totally correct since the cost of adding one extra allowed character vs increasing password length by one is not the same but w/e.
- MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
  I've sent feedback to a couple dozen sites over this. Most were government website (internal military sites are the worst) but when various financial institutions started updating their policies they forcing this silliness. When they don't allow spaces in passwords either, I worry.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Keep in mind, there are situations where the website you're using is interfacing to backend systems that have constraints that can't easily be changed (colloquially known as "legacy systems"). Feedback is good, but change takes time.
    - zrm 8y ago
maltalex 8y ago
Nice job. I've actually been looking for more places to hang out with the HN crowd. I'm not sure about this approach though. Forums are too centralized and don't feel interactive enough. I'd much rather see a HN community on Matrix or something similar.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Have you downloaded Riot.IM? There’s lots of rooms on there that likely have high cross over with HN.
- caitlinface 8y ago
  What about a Discord server?
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Discord is an interesting idea, though I am not a fan of them retaining all messages forever.
  - mykull 8y ago
    Don't you think many HN posters will object to using a chat service with a fishy as-of-yet probably-not-profitable business model and a big ol' database of all the messages sent? Discord is a great service for now, but it's unclear to me what their plans are in terms of monetization and user privacy.
    - unicornomy 8y ago
      I don't think HN users will actually object using this service. Although I dont understand why would you call it FISHY - because what's there on Discord that's not anywhere else on Google :) or Alexa ;) About Monetization Here you go : https://goo.gl/Af7xwR https://goo.gl/Af7xwR
- dchuk 8y ago
  That was actually part of the point of using an "old school" software package for this. I totally understand that there are newer/arguably "better" ways to handle online conversation, but some of us grew up on forums like this so the nostalgia is just right.
psychometry 8y ago
The banner should be about 10% of its current height.
- dchuk 8y ago
  To be fair, it's only really big on the homepage, all other pages it gets much smaller.
  - combatentropy 8y ago
    And there I think it should be 90% smaller too
krapp 8y ago
Good luck. I definitely think personal webpages and self-hosted forums need to make a comeback. However... Your FAQ link leads to a 404 page, and the "legalese" on the registration page seems like a bit much to me. And why should I need to be registered to see the "team" page and profiles? It's just a web forum, don't take things so seriously. You're an admin, you can literally just ban people for acting up, you don't have to expect to back it up in a court of law or anything.
- dchuk 8y ago
  All of those things are default settings that I haven't gotten to either from time available or just not knowing the ins and outs of the software. All of those items are in my todo list now!
  - krapp 8y ago
    Also, maybe consider pinning a bug reporting/code thread in the software development section.
    - dchuk 8y ago
      Good call, will do.
happertiger 8y ago
Is it possible to do this in discord? I think it would be much more successful than phpbb.
- dchuk 8y ago
  How so? (Not doubting, genuinely curious). Discord seems to be a chat app, which is quite different than a forum and even HN itself
  - rvanmil 8y ago
    I think GP meant Discourse.
  - severine 8y ago
    I think parent meant Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/about https://www.discourse.org/about (FWIW)
- newsat13 8y ago
  While the forum software needs to be decent, I don't think it is the fundamental reason it succeeds or not.
ivm 8y ago
The problem of a community like this is the future growth. How will you attract more HN'ers after this submission is buried?
- dchuk 8y ago
  No clue! Ultimately it's completely unrealistic to expect to siphon off users from anywhere, instead we should have this as a complementary community I guess.
mabynogy 8y ago
Consider making something without login (like on 4chan).
irunbackwards 8y ago
Turn PHP errors off!
- dchuk 8y ago
  Added to my list!
LeoPanthera 8y ago
A forum for hackers that doesn't have an NNTP interface? ;)
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  I might spin up some NNTP servers if there was enough interest. I would likely keep it text-only.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    'comp.misc' exists on USENet and has done since the dawn of time. It's fairly spam free these days, and a few dedicated people post stuff to it. It's in a perfect place to be used again and turned into a meaningful discussion hub.
    - LinuxBender 8y ago
      I've noticed a lot of the spammers have vanished. Good point. I am certainly lazy enough to not stand up more servers or buy feeds again.
      - Jaruzel 8y ago
        A nice simple USENet <-> Web gateway would be useful tho, as Google groups is hideous.
justboxing 8y ago
FAQ = 404 https://hackerforums.co/help/faq https://hackerforums.co/help/faq
frasinet 8y ago
I hope this gets enough traction. That much orange (on all pages) is unbearable during night if you're using flux.
- dchuk 8y ago
  There actually is a night mode for this theme that users can toggle to. I'll get it enabled tonight.
CM30 8y ago
Well, I just signed up. Not sure if I'll be active here, but I always like to support forums over social media sites and other corporate silos. That said, if I can give you a bit of advice: Change that captcha on the registration page. It's really annoying to decipher, and likely doesn't do all that much to stop bots. Instead, get a few questions and answers set up, and make them forum specific. Like, what startup aggregator is Hacker News associated with? What's FANG mean? What language are the frameworks React, Vue and Angular written in? In other words, stuff a dedicated community member would know/could easily look up, but which a bot might not want to bother with. That's much better to stop spam, and less annoying than figuring out what letters and numbers are in a captcha. Still, hope the forum works out well!
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thanks for signing up and thanks for the feedback! I agree that that captcha sucks, but it's the default so I left it for now. I'll add all this to my todo list!
  - RealityVoid 8y ago
    I have a different problem in that the captcha will not get validated for me! I tried registering, but it seems that no matter how many times I try the captcha code shwos invalid. I'm not a bot, I swear! :)
    - dchuk 8y ago
      Damn, sorry to hear this. Email me at me@dchuk.com and let me sort this out for you
Kagerjay 8y ago
I think its a great idea. Topics shouldn't be the same as those found on hackernews, those would be redundant though. I would suggest using discourse.org instead of rolling your own phpBB instance
- dchuk 8y ago
  Well, it's been rolled :) I'm honestly not the biggest fan of discourse, though I do appreciate it as a project. I like the old school BB style. One opportunity we have as a forum is to create continuity between the trending conversations and more "long term" discussions that are difficult to have on a platform that is churning out new content constantly and lacks notifications about replies etc
merinowool 8y ago
Are you compliant with GDPR?
keithnz 8y ago
I wonder if a discord for HN would be better? I've been keep track of HN related things people have built and added this also https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity
- LambdaComplex 8y ago
  I feel like most of HN would rather have an IRC server/channel
Mandatum 8y ago
Don't make me provide my email address.
JdeBP 8y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060619 .
slater 8y ago
After registering: [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions_messenger.php on line 506: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable
- dchuk 8y ago
  On my list to fix. It's interesting, doesn't see like everyone is getting this issue.
RickS 8y ago
UX nitpick: The form entry links (lounge, etc) have hover states for the entire row, implying they're clickable, but in reality only the name within the row is clickable. Best to make the whole row clickable for maximum ease. also +1 to shaving that banner height by 50% but good on you for shipping a thing
- dchuk 8y ago
  Great feedback, I'll see what I can do to adjust for both things!
lokufda222 8y ago
It would have been nicer to just use discourse.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Why's that?
  - thesmok 8y ago
    I personally avoid all the classis PHP-based forums because they've been outdated for 10yr now. Discourse is much more usable, especially on mobile.
alexozer 8y ago
Just a heads up, using an external password manager on Firefox for the login screen is broken. It seems that if the username or password field is selected and then Firefox is unfocused and refocused, the field is no longer selected. Works in Chromium. See: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/16938 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/16938
- dchuk 8y ago
  Whoa, interesting. Thanks for submitting this, I’ll do my best to help solve this!
devcpp 8y ago
Excellent initiative. However, I wish you had adopted some more compact and minimalistic system like https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/ (also FOSS). I think the compactness is a big reason of the success of Reddit and HN with the tech crowd. UX people be damned, we don't like wasted space.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I briefly looked at smf but it didn’t seem as well supported as phpbb was (though it did look nice). Any specific examples of wasted space you think I should address?
tluyben2 8y ago
Great! That captcha is bloody awful but I got in :)
zippoxer 8y ago
God I miss forums.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Join us!
cryptos 8y ago
Am I the only one preferring hierarchical forums? Longer discussions in flat forums are almost always a mess. I think that we need a forum with the good hierarchical overview of the good, old usenet clients (but with updated UI, of course).
danmaz74 8y ago
I really miss a way to connect with other interesting people from HN. I'm afraid that a simple forum won't work, though, because of (social) scalability: there are good reasons why HN practically bans all banter, light exchanges, or turf wars that usually come to dominate popular subreddits and similar places. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about a possible solution focused on allowing remote hackers to at least do professional networking. It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile). With this said, I hope I'm wrong, so I'll subscribe and wish best of luck to this new forum :)
- dchuk 8y ago
  Thank you! Regarding this: "It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile)." Start a Show HF thread on the board!
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    > Start a Show HF thread on the board! I will - when I'll have something to show :)
vinayms 8y ago
I see a lot of the members are appreciative of this. This venture may or may not take off, but I have to ask this: Why do we need another forum that will potentially split the community? This is 'hacker' news after all. Can't this website release its forum software so that a bunch of interested volunteers (no me) could improve it? Wouldn't that be really meta and cool? The main gripe I have with HN forum is lack of reply notification. Secondly, the crowd tends to overdo the hacker-nerd-geek thing by discussing unrelated minutae till the cows come home which inflates the comment count. This sort of discourages posters to post their POV fearing it will be buried amidst the 500+ comments. We have a visibility problem. We just need a few tweaks. Further, looking at all the passionate discussion about AI and ML that happens here, I am sure some of the regulars would like to implement a scheme that learns my 'collapse the chaff' pattern and spare me the gory boredom inside a thread. (I think what I wrote might come across as snarky, but I assure you I am not being so.)
- el_cid 8y ago
  You are right... HN is starting to have a visibility issue. But I can't see how it can be fixed. All successful online communities have to deal with this aspect eventually. They all become too popular at one point and it's hard to maintain the quality. I can't see how it can be fixed.
  - vinayms 8y ago
    Its actually quite simple - push the thread with the latest comments to the top. But in order to stop such threads from hogging the front page, there can be another tab for 'active' threads that people can visit to check out latest discussions. The current front page remains unchanged, with whatever algorithm that's used to order the threads.
    - dchuk 8y ago
      This is a good idea, and I'd be very interested to see if they ever added that, as it would essentially solve the long running conversation problem that exists on HN now.

175 points by dchuk 8y ago

This site was borne of the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138 (Specifically this part of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17071224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17071224) I spun up an instance of phpBB (trying to keep costs down) and customized a ThemeForest theme to make it not ugly. I'll post a thread today that lists all of my notes from the setup process of the site for anyone interested. I'm a huge fan of the bulletin board/flat forum model of communication, so I'm hoping this site can blossom into a community of high quality folks having high quality conversations. EDIT: Also, this is my first foray into setting up and using phpBB, so please let me know if I need to adjust anything. I tried to keep most settings at the default because I assumed that made more sense than me tickering, but I'm all ears if things are weird.

mongol 8y ago
I am thinking of starting a forum myself. How did you go about selecting phpBB of all options? I have mostly looked at nodeBB but have not taken any practical steps yet.
- dchuk 8y ago
  It's dead simple to setup, and very cheap to host. Plus I found some decent themes for it that were easy to tweak. Overall though, nodeBB looks really nice, so go for it!
  - Can_Not 8y ago
    Note on NodeBB's QA process: https://github.com/nodebb/nodebb/issues/4600 https://github.com/nodebb/nodebb/issues/4600 I would love to be corrected in this, (and in fact I'm prototyping a NodeJS+NuxtJS+VueJS forum on the weekends, but don't expect a release this year) but I think you're better off sticking with the PHP variety of forums. I think that's where maturity, stability, and extensions ecosystem shine.
chatmasta 8y ago
Nice man, reminds me of a forum we used to visit ;-)
- dchuk 8y ago
  ;)
- Jake232 8y ago
  I miss those days ;)
lgregg 8y ago
that is a throwback, starting a phpBB forum was one of my first forays into the web back in 2001.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Nice!
ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
Nice, I'm in.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Welcome!

greggyb 8y ago

I've already registered. I'm super hopeful that this grows into a real forum community for extended discussions. I, like many other posters in the inspiration thread, used to have a number of forums I frequented which mostly died off between the rise of Facebook and Reddit. I'm a fan of the conversation format, and I hope enough others are as well (:

dchuk 8y ago
Thanks for signing up! I have the same hope, let's see how it goes.

Jake232 8y ago

Cool idea. HN can get a little annoying / slightly unwieldy when threads get large. A forum is a much better format IMO.

dchuk 8y ago
Thanks and agreed! Good seeing ya post here btw

sevensor 8y ago

Neat idea. I generally like HN, but it's definitely not a hangout spot. Discouraging idle chatter cuts both ways.

dchuk 8y ago
Agreed, and thank you! Come join us! Another major upside to forums is the ability to easily directly connect to folks. I've made many friends that way over the years in various forums, and business partners.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Registered.

danmg 8y ago

Nice idea, but I have a feeling that 'Hangout' will turn into 'brigade things we like/don't like' aka Reddit.

dchuk 8y ago
How so?
- danmg 8y ago
  That's how it usually goes with a side channel used to discuss another communications channel. E.g., "Can you believe this trash got on the front page!" everyone proceeds to downvote or "hey my show hn is up!" everyone upvotes.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Hmm, that is certainly possible. Hopefully instead it can just be folks who are looking for a different type of interaction that a flat forum provides over something like this site. Worth a shot at least.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's what was going on on the IRC channel as well at some point.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ploggingdev 8y ago

Nice idea. The biggest hurdle with starting a community site is getting the initial users and maintaining a level of activity that keeps bringing back users to the site. If activity slows down a little, you will find that traffic decreases proportionally. How do you plan to solve the chicken and egg problem? After the initial launch, what's the plan to get your site in front of potential users? I am working on a somewhat related idea : a site like reddit, but which also has a chat room for each subreddit/topic + public moderation logs among other features. I launched with only the chat rooms part of it and I faced the issues mentioned above, so I'm interested in hearing about your approach. Good luck!

dchuk 8y ago
Thanks. Totally agreed that forums (and communities in general) have the cold start problem, and there's no real good solution for it. I do have some ideas though. 1) I'm interested in whipping up a simple phpBB mod that enables Link posts (like here on HN). That will help with the News posting aspect of the community. Thread here: https://hackerforums.co/the-lounge-f3/idea-extension-for-phpbb-that-allows-users-to-subm-t6.html https://hackerforums.co/the-lounge-f3/idea-extension-for-php... 2) I'm going to write up a fairly detailed thread later today that explains in more detail the Why of setting up the site, and the How I did it (literal technical details for those interested). I'll post that here and on Reddit and a few other places to hopefully get some exposure. Cool kids call that "traffic leaking" where you get valuable content in front of active communities, so might drive some traffic. 3) I'm debating setting up a contest of sorts, where members can earn a special badge/title by actively participating in the forum. So for example, start 10 threads and post 25 replies in threads and earn a special badge on your account for eternity. Silly, sure, but could be a simple fire starter. But yeah, overall, it's a challenging thing to do, and I've failed at it a few times over the years in trying to start forums. I still really love them though, so I wanted to try it again. BTW: Post your project here! :) https://hackerforums.co/show-hf-f7/ https://hackerforums.co/show-hf-f7/
matte_black 8y ago
The way to solve the chicken and egg problem is through paid posters. If you hire an initial group of people to post content and reply to new users eventually visitors who come on board will see the buzz and participate. Then you can phase out paid posters when you no longer need them. Pretty easy.

jwong_ 8y ago

After registering, I'm seeing this: [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions_messenger.php on line 506: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable Probably best to turn off debugging statements.

dchuk 8y ago
Hmm, interesting. I'll take a look, thanks for letting me know. Just so I'm clear, this happened immediately after registering? Or did you do anything else that triggered this?
- Washuu 8y ago
  That is happening because you are running PHP 7.2. In that file $this->extra_headers is initialized as non-countable NULL. Basically phpBB needs to update their code base to support newer versions of PHP. A quick fix would be to change "var ... $extra_headers" at the top of the file to "protected $extra_headers = [];".
  - Jake232 8y ago
    It's probably a safe assumption that they use a similar style elsewhere though, so probably better to just change PHP version rather than edit the source files? I could be wrong, (I'm a Python guy - not PHP), just seems a safe assumption that it's likely not the only spot.
    - krapp 8y ago
      > so probably better to just change PHP version rather than edit the source files? NO. It's better to improve the code than roll back to an older and less secure version of the language. This is PHP we're talking about, after all.
    - grandpoobah 8y ago
      I agree with your logic. Best to just do what jwong_ said and disable warnings.

gnicholas 8y ago

I like this idea because HN mods (reasonably) discourage certain types of discussions as off-topic. But I'm actually interested to know what HNers think about various topics that may be deemed off-topic by mods. Looking forward to joining your community!

dchuk 8y ago
Thank you! I'm not quite sure how we'll deal with off topic stuff, I personally think it's fine as long as it's in an official off topic/general area. We'll see how it goes!
VoodooJuJu 8y ago
I agree, particularly when it comes to political discourse. HN is one of the most intelligent places on the internet and I think it'd be very enlightening to hear what such great minds have to say about political topics.
- dchuk 8y ago
  Join us! Bring it on!

jasonvorhe 8y ago

> must contain letters in mixed case, must contain numbers and must contain symbols Please don't do this. Have a minimum length, but don't force me to miss it up. My password manager shouldn't have to try multiple times to generate matching passphrase.

shiado 8y ago
Yeah this is annoying. Simply consider a^b, what makes that expression grow faster, increasing a, or increasing b? b is better mathematically and for mental overhead.
- zawerf 8y ago
  The mathematical part was not obvious to me, so: The derivative with respect to a is: b(a^(b-1)). The derivative with respect to b is: log(a)(a^b) or (a log(a))(a^(b-1)). So it's better to increase b when alog(a) > b. Which is typically the case where a is 26 for lowercased letters and b is like 10 for password length. This analysis might not be totally correct since the cost of adding one extra allowed character vs increasing password length by one is not the same but w/e.
MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
I've sent feedback to a couple dozen sites over this. Most were government website (internal military sites are the worst) but when various financial institutions started updating their policies they forcing this silliness. When they don't allow spaces in passwords either, I worry.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Keep in mind, there are situations where the website you're using is interfacing to backend systems that have constraints that can't easily be changed (colloquially known as "legacy systems"). Feedback is good, but change takes time.
  - zrm 8y ago

maltalex 8y ago

Nice job. I've actually been looking for more places to hang out with the HN crowd. I'm not sure about this approach though. Forums are too centralized and don't feel interactive enough. I'd much rather see a HN community on Matrix or something similar.

chatmasta 8y ago
Have you downloaded Riot.IM? There’s lots of rooms on there that likely have high cross over with HN.
caitlinface 8y ago
What about a Discord server?
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Discord is an interesting idea, though I am not a fan of them retaining all messages forever.
- mykull 8y ago
  Don't you think many HN posters will object to using a chat service with a fishy as-of-yet probably-not-profitable business model and a big ol' database of all the messages sent? Discord is a great service for now, but it's unclear to me what their plans are in terms of monetization and user privacy.
  - unicornomy 8y ago
    I don't think HN users will actually object using this service. Although I dont understand why would you call it FISHY - because what's there on Discord that's not anywhere else on Google :) or Alexa ;) About Monetization Here you go : https://goo.gl/Af7xwR https://goo.gl/Af7xwR
dchuk 8y ago
That was actually part of the point of using an "old school" software package for this. I totally understand that there are newer/arguably "better" ways to handle online conversation, but some of us grew up on forums like this so the nostalgia is just right.

psychometry 8y ago

The banner should be about 10% of its current height.

dchuk 8y ago
To be fair, it's only really big on the homepage, all other pages it gets much smaller.
- combatentropy 8y ago
  And there I think it should be 90% smaller too

krapp 8y ago

Good luck. I definitely think personal webpages and self-hosted forums need to make a comeback. However... Your FAQ link leads to a 404 page, and the "legalese" on the registration page seems like a bit much to me. And why should I need to be registered to see the "team" page and profiles? It's just a web forum, don't take things so seriously. You're an admin, you can literally just ban people for acting up, you don't have to expect to back it up in a court of law or anything.

dchuk 8y ago
All of those things are default settings that I haven't gotten to either from time available or just not knowing the ins and outs of the software. All of those items are in my todo list now!
- krapp 8y ago
  Also, maybe consider pinning a bug reporting/code thread in the software development section.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Good call, will do.

happertiger 8y ago

Is it possible to do this in discord? I think it would be much more successful than phpbb.

dchuk 8y ago
How so? (Not doubting, genuinely curious). Discord seems to be a chat app, which is quite different than a forum and even HN itself
- rvanmil 8y ago
  I think GP meant Discourse.
- severine 8y ago
  I think parent meant Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/about https://www.discourse.org/about (FWIW)
newsat13 8y ago
While the forum software needs to be decent, I don't think it is the fundamental reason it succeeds or not.

ivm 8y ago

The problem of a community like this is the future growth. How will you attract more HN'ers after this submission is buried?

dchuk 8y ago
No clue! Ultimately it's completely unrealistic to expect to siphon off users from anywhere, instead we should have this as a complementary community I guess.

mabynogy 8y ago

Consider making something without login (like on 4chan).

irunbackwards 8y ago

Turn PHP errors off!

dchuk 8y ago
Added to my list!

LeoPanthera 8y ago

A forum for hackers that doesn't have an NNTP interface? ;)

LinuxBender 8y ago
I might spin up some NNTP servers if there was enough interest. I would likely keep it text-only.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  'comp.misc' exists on USENet and has done since the dawn of time. It's fairly spam free these days, and a few dedicated people post stuff to it. It's in a perfect place to be used again and turned into a meaningful discussion hub.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    I've noticed a lot of the spammers have vanished. Good point. I am certainly lazy enough to not stand up more servers or buy feeds again.
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      A nice simple USENet <-> Web gateway would be useful tho, as Google groups is hideous.

justboxing 8y ago

FAQ = 404 https://hackerforums.co/help/faq https://hackerforums.co/help/faq

frasinet 8y ago

I hope this gets enough traction. That much orange (on all pages) is unbearable during night if you're using flux.

dchuk 8y ago
There actually is a night mode for this theme that users can toggle to. I'll get it enabled tonight.

CM30 8y ago

Well, I just signed up. Not sure if I'll be active here, but I always like to support forums over social media sites and other corporate silos. That said, if I can give you a bit of advice: Change that captcha on the registration page. It's really annoying to decipher, and likely doesn't do all that much to stop bots. Instead, get a few questions and answers set up, and make them forum specific. Like, what startup aggregator is Hacker News associated with? What's FANG mean? What language are the frameworks React, Vue and Angular written in? In other words, stuff a dedicated community member would know/could easily look up, but which a bot might not want to bother with. That's much better to stop spam, and less annoying than figuring out what letters and numbers are in a captcha. Still, hope the forum works out well!

dchuk 8y ago
Thanks for signing up and thanks for the feedback! I agree that that captcha sucks, but it's the default so I left it for now. I'll add all this to my todo list!
- RealityVoid 8y ago
  I have a different problem in that the captcha will not get validated for me! I tried registering, but it seems that no matter how many times I try the captcha code shwos invalid. I'm not a bot, I swear! :)
  - dchuk 8y ago
    Damn, sorry to hear this. Email me at me@dchuk.com and let me sort this out for you

Kagerjay 8y ago

I think its a great idea. Topics shouldn't be the same as those found on hackernews, those would be redundant though. I would suggest using discourse.org instead of rolling your own phpBB instance

dchuk 8y ago
Well, it's been rolled :) I'm honestly not the biggest fan of discourse, though I do appreciate it as a project. I like the old school BB style. One opportunity we have as a forum is to create continuity between the trending conversations and more "long term" discussions that are difficult to have on a platform that is churning out new content constantly and lacks notifications about replies etc

merinowool 8y ago

Are you compliant with GDPR?

keithnz 8y ago

I wonder if a discord for HN would be better? I've been keep track of HN related things people have built and added this also https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity

LambdaComplex 8y ago
I feel like most of HN would rather have an IRC server/channel

Mandatum 8y ago

Don't make me provide my email address.

JdeBP 8y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060619 .

slater 8y ago

After registering: [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions_messenger.php on line 506: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable

dchuk 8y ago
On my list to fix. It's interesting, doesn't see like everyone is getting this issue.

RickS 8y ago

UX nitpick: The form entry links (lounge, etc) have hover states for the entire row, implying they're clickable, but in reality only the name within the row is clickable. Best to make the whole row clickable for maximum ease. also +1 to shaving that banner height by 50% but good on you for shipping a thing

dchuk 8y ago
Great feedback, I'll see what I can do to adjust for both things!

lokufda222 8y ago

It would have been nicer to just use discourse.

dchuk 8y ago
Why's that?
- thesmok 8y ago
  I personally avoid all the classis PHP-based forums because they've been outdated for 10yr now. Discourse is much more usable, especially on mobile.

alexozer 8y ago

Just a heads up, using an external password manager on Firefox for the login screen is broken. It seems that if the username or password field is selected and then Firefox is unfocused and refocused, the field is no longer selected. Works in Chromium. See: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/16938 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/16938

dchuk 8y ago
Whoa, interesting. Thanks for submitting this, I’ll do my best to help solve this!

devcpp 8y ago

Excellent initiative. However, I wish you had adopted some more compact and minimalistic system like https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/ (also FOSS). I think the compactness is a big reason of the success of Reddit and HN with the tech crowd. UX people be damned, we don't like wasted space.

dchuk 8y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I briefly looked at smf but it didn’t seem as well supported as phpbb was (though it did look nice). Any specific examples of wasted space you think I should address?

tluyben2 8y ago

Great! That captcha is bloody awful but I got in :)

zippoxer 8y ago

God I miss forums.

dchuk 8y ago
Join us!

cryptos 8y ago

Am I the only one preferring hierarchical forums? Longer discussions in flat forums are almost always a mess. I think that we need a forum with the good hierarchical overview of the good, old usenet clients (but with updated UI, of course).

danmaz74 8y ago

I really miss a way to connect with other interesting people from HN. I'm afraid that a simple forum won't work, though, because of (social) scalability: there are good reasons why HN practically bans all banter, light exchanges, or turf wars that usually come to dominate popular subreddits and similar places. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about a possible solution focused on allowing remote hackers to at least do professional networking. It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile). With this said, I hope I'm wrong, so I'll subscribe and wish best of luck to this new forum :)

dchuk 8y ago
Thank you! Regarding this: "It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile)." Start a Show HF thread on the board!
- danmaz74 8y ago
  > Start a Show HF thread on the board! I will - when I'll have something to show :)

vinayms 8y ago

I see a lot of the members are appreciative of this. This venture may or may not take off, but I have to ask this: Why do we need another forum that will potentially split the community? This is 'hacker' news after all. Can't this website release its forum software so that a bunch of interested volunteers (no me) could improve it? Wouldn't that be really meta and cool? The main gripe I have with HN forum is lack of reply notification. Secondly, the crowd tends to overdo the hacker-nerd-geek thing by discussing unrelated minutae till the cows come home which inflates the comment count. This sort of discourages posters to post their POV fearing it will be buried amidst the 500+ comments. We have a visibility problem. We just need a few tweaks. Further, looking at all the passionate discussion about AI and ML that happens here, I am sure some of the regulars would like to implement a scheme that learns my 'collapse the chaff' pattern and spare me the gory boredom inside a thread. (I think what I wrote might come across as snarky, but I assure you I am not being so.)

el_cid 8y ago
You are right... HN is starting to have a visibility issue. But I can't see how it can be fixed. All successful online communities have to deal with this aspect eventually. They all become too popular at one point and it's hard to maintain the quality. I can't see how it can be fixed.
- vinayms 8y ago
  Its actually quite simple - push the thread with the latest comments to the top. But in order to stop such threads from hogging the front page, there can be another tab for 'active' threads that people can visit to check out latest discussions. The current front page remains unchanged, with whatever algorithm that's used to order the threads.
  - dchuk 8y ago
    This is a good idea, and I'd be very interested to see if they ever added that, as it would essentially solve the long running conversation problem that exists on HN now.