4 ms·

Obvious question but still worth asking: what about the other 'Hosted Forum Services?' (I know absolutely nothing for this domain, but with a quick googling I c

by d0m 14y ago

Obvious question but still worth asking: what about the other 'Hosted Forum Services?' (I know absolutely nothing for this domain, but with a quick googling I came up with a couple services such as http://www.proboards.com http://www.proboards.com) If you compare it to tumblr, I guess it has to do with the way a user can follow multiple ones at the same time? As such, would it be a little like "Reddit for forum?"

buro9 14y ago
The complaint users have against existing software is that not everything is a post in a thread. That simple thing means that things like classifieds are currently threads. Events, are threads. Articles, are threads. Reviews, are threads. It drives them mad. They can't find anything, cannot do anything with the information. They can't even compare classifieds, or find events and map them. They're forced to then smash up their community's content and litter it around the web. Some on eBay, some on Facebook or Meetup.com. Which is a real problem for them: discoverability/search is poor, data ownership is a mess, permissions are confused, etc. They want a basic form of all of this stuff within the forum that they're using. They want to bring it back home. None of the hosted forum software solves this. And because of things like the built-in search, it's really hard to hack a vBulletin (or something else) instance into having this. It should've been there from day one.
- precisioncoder 14y ago
  That sounds incredible, I am going to have to look deeper into your company when I get the chance.
  - buro9 14y ago
    Not a great deal publicly visible yet... but if you do enter your details on LaunchRock http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ I promise that when we have news we will let you know. But if you want programmer insight and are ever in London, UK... I run open office hours all the time. Just drop me an email and pop in.
    - precisioncoder 14y ago
      Ooooo that's tempting, I'm in Austria so I pass through there occasionally, next time I am I'll send an email and see if I can swing by. In the meantime I signed up for the mailing list and will keep an eye out, hopefully you'll send out a mail with screenshots at some point before the release?
- ddorian43 14y ago
  any info on the backend, what are you using for the search, database, framework, language ?
  - buro9 14y ago
    Database is Postgres. File store remains an open question we've deferred on by not yet implementing file upload ;) The master is likely to be Riak and CloudFront as the CDN for it. API is written in Go. Front-end is Python and Django, though we have a number of volunteers who are asking for hackathons to help implement the front. Some of these know Ruby and Rails and not Django... so it may be that we actually offer two flavours of front-end... the official one which we will update in Django and an alternative one in Rails. We've had people already ask things like, "Why not Mongo and Node?". But we just don't go there. Such questions can be asked until the cows come home, and we prefer to just get things done today than engage in non-pragmatic debates.
    - ddorian43 14y ago
      What about search, and multitenancy (ie postgresql schemas?)? How do you store extended data (hstore?) that you talk about in the upper comments?
      - buro9 14y ago
        Those are the best questions and the best answer is, "It's complex.". We've not answered of those problems in the ways you've hinted at though. Maybe one day there will be a High Scalability article that explains it... it takes more space than a HN comment would provide.

by d0m 14y ago

buro9 14y ago

The complaint users have against existing software is that not everything is a post in a thread. That simple thing means that things like classifieds are currently threads. Events, are threads. Articles, are threads. Reviews, are threads. It drives them mad. They can't find anything, cannot do anything with the information. They can't even compare classifieds, or find events and map them. They're forced to then smash up their community's content and litter it around the web. Some on eBay, some on Facebook or Meetup.com. Which is a real problem for them: discoverability/search is poor, data ownership is a mess, permissions are confused, etc. They want a basic form of all of this stuff within the forum that they're using. They want to bring it back home. None of the hosted forum software solves this. And because of things like the built-in search, it's really hard to hack a vBulletin (or something else) instance into having this. It should've been there from day one.

precisioncoder 14y ago
That sounds incredible, I am going to have to look deeper into your company when I get the chance.
- buro9 14y ago
  Not a great deal publicly visible yet... but if you do enter your details on LaunchRock http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ I promise that when we have news we will let you know. But if you want programmer insight and are ever in London, UK... I run open office hours all the time. Just drop me an email and pop in.
  - precisioncoder 14y ago
    Ooooo that's tempting, I'm in Austria so I pass through there occasionally, next time I am I'll send an email and see if I can swing by. In the meantime I signed up for the mailing list and will keep an eye out, hopefully you'll send out a mail with screenshots at some point before the release?
ddorian43 14y ago
any info on the backend, what are you using for the search, database, framework, language ?
- buro9 14y ago
  Database is Postgres. File store remains an open question we've deferred on by not yet implementing file upload ;) The master is likely to be Riak and CloudFront as the CDN for it. API is written in Go. Front-end is Python and Django, though we have a number of volunteers who are asking for hackathons to help implement the front. Some of these know Ruby and Rails and not Django... so it may be that we actually offer two flavours of front-end... the official one which we will update in Django and an alternative one in Rails. We've had people already ask things like, "Why not Mongo and Node?". But we just don't go there. Such questions can be asked until the cows come home, and we prefer to just get things done today than engage in non-pragmatic debates.
  - ddorian43 14y ago
    What about search, and multitenancy (ie postgresql schemas?)? How do you store extended data (hstore?) that you talk about in the upper comments?
    - buro9 14y ago
      Those are the best questions and the best answer is, "It's complex.". We've not answered of those problems in the ways you've hinted at though. Maybe one day there will be a High Scalability article that explains it... it takes more space than a HN comment would provide.