9 ms·

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

LinuxBender 4y ago
For what it's worth, phpBB still sortof supports having javascript disabled [1] but it is nowhere near as lightweight as the example here created by demindiro. I also commend demindiro on not requiring JS. It is refreshing to see simple yet useful applications. [1] - https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245 https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245
make_me_rich 4y ago
Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.
  - ngrilly 4y ago
    I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.
    - halikular 4y ago
      Notifications and sorting for new like reddit has.
      - asddubs 4y ago
        that only really works for responses to your comments and top level comment chains though.
        Semaphor 4y ago
        Technically, you should be able to subscribe to any comment’s descendants. But that is not implemented anywhere I know, sadly.
    - busymom0 4y ago
      I am the developer of HACK, an iOS, android, MacOS client app which provides push notifications for HN when someone replies to your comment or post.
    - layer8 4y ago
      The way Usenet clients and traditional email clients work is that unread messages are marked as such (usually by use of bold typeface), and you have keyboard shortcuts to navigate from one message to the next, or to jump to the next unread message. For example, the Tab key jumps to the next unread message, Space/Backspace scroll up/down within a message, and the Up/Down arrow keys jump to the previous/next message (regardless if unread or not). A message is marked as read automatically when you navigate to it (it gains focus). There’s also a keyboard shortcut to mark a read message as unread again if you w. The keyboard navigation means that only one message has focus any point in time. You have a threaded view of all messages, where the unread ones are highlighted (e.g. by bold typeface). Then you can decide which ones to navigate to. Usually you just use Tab and Space to jump/scroll through the unread messages. It’s incredibly efficient to use.
  - ratww 4y ago
    > Old Reddit Important distinction. New Reddit also fell prey to bad development practices and is without exaggeration unusable for me. It often "crashes" and the whole page goes dark-grey on my browser, and this has been happening for at least a year. After reloading I can't see all messages without navigating away, and middle click messes with the scrolling. At this point I will assume they either don't care or are fucking with me.
    - ffhhj 4y ago
      Which browser do you use?
      - ratww 4y ago
        Firefox mostly, but that also happens with Safari in my other PC.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. This is not new, it just isn't applied to web based forums as much as I (someone who likes threaded discussions like that) would like. For small discussions it make little difference, for large branching threads it can help greatly when you don't care to follow all the sub-threads. It was not uncommon in Usenet clients back in the day. Of course it needs to be coupled with good UI for collapsing branches and otherwise navigating the tree, and perhaps a chronological view option for issue who prefer that (or a tree-view with posts spaced by arrival order for the best of both of you do it right - I had a reader that did that but can't currently remember it's name).
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other. But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion. Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now. [1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952 http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    vBulletin 3.x/4.x and IPB 2.x/3.x had threaded view as an option alongside flat. Forum software of old actually gave users the power to choose the interface they want. We've really gone backwards with software interfaces. Also, themes. These days all we get are "Dark Mode" and "Light Mode". Boring.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.
    - llanowarelves 4y ago
      What are they using?
      - anta40 4y ago
        https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
        llanowarelves 4y ago
        Thank you. I just found it now on my own on desktop via their "About this forum" footer link, wasn't obvious to me when I quickly glanced at it on mobile earlier.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
- com2kid 4y ago
  I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability. Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem. Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond. Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)
- cygx 4y ago
  Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    it works if you want to read a thread exactly once and then never come back to it. if it's an ongoing discussion that you want to visit even just two times, you'll just end up reading all the same comments again and struggle to find anything new
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I too miss the good old days where the information you wanted was buried somewhere in a 100 page phpBB thread and you had to manually search through it 1 page at a time, with each one-line comment taking up half the page with avatars and signatures. Good times. Sad that things have moved on to systems that don't suck quite so much but that's progress for you.
- deniska 4y ago
  My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.
fuzzy2 4y ago
I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also * Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again? * Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason? Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t. Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  > I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?
  - Ralfp 4y ago
    Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”. And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish. Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...
FunnyLookinHat 4y ago
I also miss the days of good ole server-side rendered applications. I'm not sure the author's history or work experience, but, if I built something like this, I'd likely find it extremely cathartic compared to most tech stacks nowadays. :-)
gosukiwi 4y ago
PHPBB
INTPenis 4y ago
I loved PunBB. 18 years ago at my first IT job I actually stole PunBBs design to make the control panel for our web hosting company. Nobody knew because even then punbb was kinda esoteric.
skilled 4y ago
For that era, FluxBB/PunBB weren't even that great. I think phpBB/vBulletin took the cake (as was evident by the number of forums run by the said software), and of course, IPB was also nice but came with a steep price by comparison.
moffkalast 4y ago
I do still wonder why the fast and responsive software can't invest a little bit into design in order to not look like complete shit. Sure something like phpBB is light, but the UX is also barely usable. Give me something like Reddit or Discourse over that any day. Why can't we have the best of both worlds? Hackernews on the other hand manages to lack both (in some speculations intentionally), with neither usable design nor speed.
- alxlaz 4y ago
  There is a considerable cultural overlap between "people who think no-JS, fast and responsive software is cool" and "people who think the design of Reddit or Discourse is really awful". (Man, especially Reddit, I swear the day they retire old.reddit.com will be the day I stop using it). They probably are investing a little bit into design, just not the one you like.
- bulatb 4y ago
  FOSS tends to treat aesthetics like developers complain executives treat software quality: This doesn't help me. Why does it matter? Why should I care? I see no difference. Improving either is an uphill battle when decision makers don't value the work, at best, or at worst are committed to resistance. And you don't even get paid.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Yep often they don't see aesthetics/usability as a feature, and sometimes even have a grudge against it. For example, Blender pre-v2.8, many many flamewars belittling people who wanted something usable, akin to calling them shallow/superficial Untermensch who "don't understand" Blender's supposedly genius but strange design choices at that time. I suppose that's why most aren't capable of making a product and are relegated to being an employee or unpaid open source employee.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
The point of no-js is mainly to avoid client-side tracking, right? Can't you do a lot of that with CSS?

LinuxBender 4y ago

For what it's worth, phpBB still sortof supports having javascript disabled [1] but it is nowhere near as lightweight as the example here created by demindiro. I also commend demindiro on not requiring JS. It is refreshing to see simple yet useful applications. [1] - https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245 https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245

make_me_rich 4y ago

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

Semaphor 4y ago
I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.
- ngrilly 4y ago
  I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.
  - halikular 4y ago
    Notifications and sorting for new like reddit has.
    - asddubs 4y ago
      that only really works for responses to your comments and top level comment chains though.
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        Technically, you should be able to subscribe to any comment’s descendants. But that is not implemented anywhere I know, sadly.
  - busymom0 4y ago
    I am the developer of HACK, an iOS, android, MacOS client app which provides push notifications for HN when someone replies to your comment or post.
  - layer8 4y ago
    The way Usenet clients and traditional email clients work is that unread messages are marked as such (usually by use of bold typeface), and you have keyboard shortcuts to navigate from one message to the next, or to jump to the next unread message. For example, the Tab key jumps to the next unread message, Space/Backspace scroll up/down within a message, and the Up/Down arrow keys jump to the previous/next message (regardless if unread or not). A message is marked as read automatically when you navigate to it (it gains focus). There’s also a keyboard shortcut to mark a read message as unread again if you w. The keyboard navigation means that only one message has focus any point in time. You have a threaded view of all messages, where the unread ones are highlighted (e.g. by bold typeface). Then you can decide which ones to navigate to. Usually you just use Tab and Space to jump/scroll through the unread messages. It’s incredibly efficient to use.
- ratww 4y ago
  > Old Reddit Important distinction. New Reddit also fell prey to bad development practices and is without exaggeration unusable for me. It often "crashes" and the whole page goes dark-grey on my browser, and this has been happening for at least a year. After reloading I can't see all messages without navigating away, and middle click messes with the scrolling. At this point I will assume they either don't care or are fucking with me.
  - ffhhj 4y ago
    Which browser do you use?
    - ratww 4y ago
      Firefox mostly, but that also happens with Safari in my other PC.
dspillett 4y ago
> find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. This is not new, it just isn't applied to web based forums as much as I (someone who likes threaded discussions like that) would like. For small discussions it make little difference, for large branching threads it can help greatly when you don't care to follow all the sub-threads. It was not uncommon in Usenet clients back in the day. Of course it needs to be coupled with good UI for collapsing branches and otherwise navigating the tree, and perhaps a chronological view option for issue who prefer that (or a tree-view with posts spaced by arrival order for the best of both of you do it right - I had a reader that did that but can't currently remember it's name).
dmitriid 4y ago
Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other. But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion. Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now. [1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952 http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  vBulletin 3.x/4.x and IPB 2.x/3.x had threaded view as an option alongside flat. Forum software of old actually gave users the power to choose the interface they want. We've really gone backwards with software interfaces. Also, themes. These days all we get are "Dark Mode" and "Light Mode". Boring.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    What are they using?
    - anta40 4y ago
      https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
      - llanowarelves 4y ago
        Thank you. I just found it now on my own on desktop via their "About this forum" footer link, wasn't obvious to me when I quickly glanced at it on mobile earlier.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
com2kid 4y ago
I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability. Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem. Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond. Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)
cygx 4y ago
Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
I find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.
- asddubs 4y ago
  it works if you want to read a thread exactly once and then never come back to it. if it's an ongoing discussion that you want to visit even just two times, you'll just end up reading all the same comments again and struggle to find anything new
IshKebab 4y ago
I too miss the good old days where the information you wanted was buried somewhere in a 100 page phpBB thread and you had to manually search through it 1 page at a time, with each one-line comment taking up half the page with avatars and signatures. Good times. Sad that things have moved on to systems that don't suck quite so much but that's progress for you.
deniska 4y ago
My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.

fuzzy2 4y ago

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also * Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again? * Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason? Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t. Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.

tiffanyh 4y ago
> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?
- Ralfp 4y ago
  Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”. And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish. Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...

FunnyLookinHat 4y ago

I also miss the days of good ole server-side rendered applications. I'm not sure the author's history or work experience, but, if I built something like this, I'd likely find it extremely cathartic compared to most tech stacks nowadays. :-)

gosukiwi 4y ago

PHPBB

INTPenis 4y ago

I loved PunBB. 18 years ago at my first IT job I actually stole PunBBs design to make the control panel for our web hosting company. Nobody knew because even then punbb was kinda esoteric.

skilled 4y ago

For that era, FluxBB/PunBB weren't even that great. I think phpBB/vBulletin took the cake (as was evident by the number of forums run by the said software), and of course, IPB was also nice but came with a steep price by comparison.

moffkalast 4y ago

I do still wonder why the fast and responsive software can't invest a little bit into design in order to not look like complete shit. Sure something like phpBB is light, but the UX is also barely usable. Give me something like Reddit or Discourse over that any day. Why can't we have the best of both worlds? Hackernews on the other hand manages to lack both (in some speculations intentionally), with neither usable design nor speed.

alxlaz 4y ago
There is a considerable cultural overlap between "people who think no-JS, fast and responsive software is cool" and "people who think the design of Reddit or Discourse is really awful". (Man, especially Reddit, I swear the day they retire old.reddit.com will be the day I stop using it). They probably are investing a little bit into design, just not the one you like.
bulatb 4y ago
FOSS tends to treat aesthetics like developers complain executives treat software quality: This doesn't help me. Why does it matter? Why should I care? I see no difference. Improving either is an uphill battle when decision makers don't value the work, at best, or at worst are committed to resistance. And you don't even get paid.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Yep often they don't see aesthetics/usability as a feature, and sometimes even have a grudge against it. For example, Blender pre-v2.8, many many flamewars belittling people who wanted something usable, akin to calling them shallow/superficial Untermensch who "don't understand" Blender's supposedly genius but strange design choices at that time. I suppose that's why most aren't capable of making a product and are relegated to being an employee or unpaid open source employee.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

The point of no-js is mainly to avoid client-side tracking, right? Can't you do a lot of that with CSS?