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I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO,

I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting websockers) It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards. I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports) Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted. You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users. Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively. I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users. Fun times.

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
How did it end?
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content. I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage. It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away. I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract. I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    Why not start a live archive online?
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as the person describes.
      - rootsudo 6y ago
        Versus, running it for a while, as they did?
        tobyhinloopen 6y ago
        Well I did pull the plug for this reason. It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults). People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in). Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff. After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it
  - LaundroMat 6y ago
    "it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away" That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.
    - 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone" filled with the most awful stuff, or you can have a community of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it against the not-nice people.
markkat 6y ago
I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going as long as possible. >Fun times. It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess. I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of: https://hubski.com/chat https://hubski.com/chat
Nextgrid 6y ago
Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds of it looks like your app was solid.
- tomaspollak 6y ago
  If you're interested, I happened to write a simple forum software in Ruby a while ago. Indexable, light use of JS, nothing too fancy but it worked. I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.
- jamauro 6y ago
  We're working on an alternative. Curious to see if you think it might be a good fit for your use case: https://usepingpong.com https://usepingpong.com
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  It’s really old, I don’t think it’s useful to anyone.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    You may be underestimating its value. By the sounds of it, it seems like it would combine the best of both the chat worlds (Discord, Slack, etc) as well as a forum. You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc. This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).
    - tobyhinloopen 6y ago
      Are you saying there are no real time “chat”-like things with indexable posts and support for non-JS clients?

sam_lowry_ 6y ago

How did it end?

tobyhinloopen 6y ago
I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content. I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage. It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away. I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract. I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Why not start a live archive online?
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as the person describes.
    - rootsudo 6y ago
      Versus, running it for a while, as they did?
      - tobyhinloopen 6y ago
        Well I did pull the plug for this reason. It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults). People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in). Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff. After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it
- LaundroMat 6y ago
  "it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away" That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.
  - 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone" filled with the most awful stuff, or you can have a community of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it against the not-nice people.

markkat 6y ago

I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going as long as possible. >Fun times. It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess. I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of: https://hubski.com/chat https://hubski.com/chat

Nextgrid 6y ago

Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds of it looks like your app was solid.

tomaspollak 6y ago
If you're interested, I happened to write a simple forum software in Ruby a while ago. Indexable, light use of JS, nothing too fancy but it worked. I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.
jamauro 6y ago
We're working on an alternative. Curious to see if you think it might be a good fit for your use case: https://usepingpong.com https://usepingpong.com
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
It’s really old, I don’t think it’s useful to anyone.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  You may be underestimating its value. By the sounds of it, it seems like it would combine the best of both the chat worlds (Discord, Slack, etc) as well as a forum. You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc. This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).
  - tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    Are you saying there are no real time “chat”-like things with indexable posts and support for non-JS clients?