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Show HN: Real-time file sharing site
- justhw 13y agoFor those at work, there's quite a bit of stuff not tagged nsfw. Tread with care.
- jameshsi 13y agoInteresting concept for sure. What's the tech behind this?
- chmod775 13y agoHello. It's almost exclusively a nodejs + redis stack. There are currently a little over 200 people on the page and moderating the site is taking most of my attention, I'll try to answer all questions in this thread anyways.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- darkbot 13y agoBuild some community moderation tools and promote some trustworthy people.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kclay 13y agoNice concept, looks like 4chan may have gotten a hold of this one.
- hex12648430 13y agoTalking about 4chan, I really love how this site seems to be a mix of some kind of IRC and imageboard. It's also bringing back memories of some DC++ rooms I used to visit when it was the best way to share files.
- degenerate 13y agoYeah DC++ and i2hub were both awesome. Both got my internet privileges taken away for a year by my university for internet misuse. Good times.
- zufallsheld 13y agoAs far as I know, it originates from the /g/-board there.
- elliottcarlson 13y agoOr the HN community has some crossover with the 4chan one.
- hippich 13y agoNSFW
- Da_Capo 13y agoHow are you handling piracy on the site? Surely that must be an issue. I see some torrents are being uploaded.
- chmod775 13y agoPiracy is obviously an issue. And we (mods) will of course delete all files that might bring volafile in legal trouble.
- mikegioia 13y agoYou did a great job with this. I got a couple 502s viewing files but it works really well so far.
- pla3rhat3r 13y agoWait, a chat room AND the ability to share NSFW pics? What could go wrong!?!
- gmjoe 13y agoThere's always something kind of magical about real-time sites -- like the Internet is a little less lonely, and there are real people out there. Very cool!
- hfantods 13y agoExactly my feeling. Couldn't really articulate it.
- Skovy 13y agoSo basically this is a porn site... It needs moderation badly!
- theorique 13y agoTo remove all the non-porn content?
- scottydelta 13y agomusic piracy is the biggest issue you will face.
- scottydelta 13y agoI just saw some sick stuff there which can't be unseen. :'(
- volker48 13y agoTrolls... Trolls everywhere.
- jayt92 13y agoVery cool site.
- skizm 13y agoHaha, just logged in to see this: "PaulGraham: APPLY TO YC SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY FROM THIS" and also "PaulGraham: THIS IS THE NEXT FACEBOOK".
- chmod775 13y agoI'm German so I probably can't apply to YC. Plus I've just made this as a hobby/side project and don't have time to deal with trying to monetize it yet.
- argumentum 13y agoYou can definitely apply to YC if you're from Germany, or any other country.
- skizm 13y agoI am assuming this was not PG. There are much better ways to contact a site owner. Also the user kept saying "DROP THE THE". Obviously there is no "the" in the site's name.
- dgouldin 13y agoI'd hoped this was something like Napster built on WebRTC data channel. No such luck.
- dpiers 13y agoThe 12-hour lifespan of content links is interesting; it prevents indexing or hot-linking content on the site. Even if the RIAA/MPAA/etc. set up bots watching the room and issuing takedowns for infringing files, the time allowed to comply with a DMCA takedown is greater than the lifespan of a file on the service. In other words: this should be fun, until they get sued out of existence.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoFeature Request: Host on infrastructure outside of the US. EDIT: DISREGARD. It's already hosted outside the US. (Germany: https://www.ip-projects.de/ https://www.ip-projects.de/)
- chmod775 13y agoWe (ehrm, I) are based in Germany, along with all servers.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoSorry about that. I should've checked before posting. Any chance you include SHA1 hashes of the files/objects?
- monkeynotes 13y agoGenuinely interested to know how Germany is a safe-haven for file-sharing since almost every other European country would probably give you trouble.
- dsrguru 13y agoI know a lot of this post-PRISM fear of the US government is to be expected and is certainly popular on HN, but comments that single out the US like this really make little sense to me. The governments of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all share tech-related intel with the United States and, potentially if not presumably, have similarly intrusive methods of surveillance. China goes so far as to ban social media sites that they don't have control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and replaces them with sites that they do (renren, weibo, and youku/tudou). That, combined with general censorship of the web, is far scarier than what the NSA does, even assuming the NSA's scope is as wide as television shows make it out to be. And even in most other countries, the scope of domestic Internet surveillance is unknown, which is very different from "known to be minimal". Edit: Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.
- wehadfun 13y agoGlad it dose not automatically show the images.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rebel 13y agoI love this idea and I think this has the potential to be really amazing. I could see myself using it socially as well as a sort of remote office. The ability to have music autoplay (? it appears anyway, doesn't seem to be working for me right now) seems very interesting. I think you're really onto something with this. My main concern would be privacy before I started using this on any type of regular basis though. If you can solve that, or even really just make a self-hosted version, I'd be all over it.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoYou should probably block EXE files for the safety of your users.
- fragsworth 13y agoAnd .bat, .scr, .pif, .com? And .zip, .tar, .gz, .rar? And then a shit load of file extensions that potentially run arbitrary code if you have the tool installed. Seems kind of pointless.
- zhemao 13y agoOr they can just take the executable and change the extension. Extension-based blocking doesn't really work. However, these types of files generally have magic numbers in their headers that you could inspect to determine what they are. Also, it'd be rather inconvenient if you couldn't upload a compressed archive to a file-sharing site.
- source99 13y agoIt took just under 20 years for someone to re-create the core value of AOL to teenagers from the early/mid nineties.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Geee 13y agoThis thing will explode. Get ready to monetize or shut it down :) Easy thing you could do is rate limit transfers by default and offer higher bandwidth with a small bitcoin payment.
- antocv 13y agoPlease dont go down this route it leaves bad taste. Any site which segregates its users, oppreses those non-paying, poor people, isnt attractive at least in my book. An alternative is to do like reddit, offer pay-for-services in exchange for something more, not take away functionality from those poor users to force some kind of payments.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hornbaker 13y agoThe HN room is full. You can discover other rooms here: http://volafile.io/discover http://volafile.io/discover
- spindritf 13y ago> Announcement: Because of the high traffic we are seeing right now, the radio might take a long time to load or not work at all. Hacker News killed the radio star. Very cool idea. With a little faster chat (there's currently quite a delay between saying something and seeing it displayed) I can see it catching on. Hang out, share files, listen to the music together.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jffry 13y agoThis sounds really cool, but socket.io.js is throwing "Unexpected response code: 502" when attempting to make a websockets connection. I'll have to try again later, I suppose.
- ahoy 13y agoI saw this a few weeks ago, very cool project you're working on. I love the proto-web feeling it has. All the best!
- dec0dedab0de 13y agoMaybe some kind of AV scanning as files are uploaded.
- dexen 13y agoAuto-assignment of nicknames seems a particularly nifty feature -- a warm welcome for first-time users. Overall seems a well-balanced crossover of IRC and message board. (Almost) Everything Google Wave wanted to be, but never had a chance to become. How do I rent a private channel for company-wide use? ;-)
- wanda 13y agoyeah, I would also be interested in having a private channel.
- bolder88 13y agoThere's a lot of lag for a few people in a chatroom. Looks fun apart from that though.
- desouzt 13y agoIt never ceases to amaze me how immature people can be when unleashed with this type of product!
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoTo be fair, it's a 4chan project.
- devinmontgomery 13y agoI feel like I reached out and touched the face of the Internet. This is very very cool.
- shahar2k 13y agoIs this kind of platform possible with WebRTC? (where the files are hosted on the users' computers instead of requiring your own servers?)
- ingrownpsyche 13y agoI assumed this was using WebRTC. Is it not?
- erbbysam 13y agoYup it's possible. It doesn't appear to be here though, especially if the files have any sort of lifespan not dependant on the users browser staying open. Anyhow, I built something similar over at rtccopy.com which does use webrtc
- aperture 13y agoThere seems to be a twitter account here for it: https://twitter.com/volafile https://twitter.com/volafile Also, in chat I found https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs for solutions to fixing the site. However, I cannot vouch that is an official bug report location. Considering this issue (nfsw): https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs/issues/5 https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs/issues/5 I find this website a little amusing, but also creative. I think it's quite exciting overall! Good luck!
- PhearTheCeal 13y agoThat is the official bug report location.
- jaggs 13y ago"The room is full. Please try again later." You're gonna need a bigger boat.
- chmod775 13y agoI had to limit the room size to 300 people because my cheap 5€ VPS was hitting 100% CPU load. There are about 500 people on the page across all rooms now.
- codingdave 13y agoReal-time file sharing on a site that seems to have already become a real-time UI to 4chan.... Let me think about this. No, no I don't trust my virus protection enough to open anything here.
- pmelendez 13y agoI find very interesting how a lot of people is sharing their resume, suddenly all the HN traffic (potential employers included) are reading random resumes. I don't know if that would be effective at all but it is very interesting.
- vxNsr 13y agoThis is basically IRC with file sharing... and everyone is ignoring the filesharing part because it's full of porn. So basically you created a html5 IRC clone, very cool. Just wondering: What are your plans for this? And Does this have any IRC-like commands?
- hex12648430 13y ago>and everyone is ignoring the filesharing part because it's full of porn. It's much better in smaller rooms.
- vxNsr 13y agoMakes sense, I could see this eclipsing the current way we share files. Thought of a new analogy: snapchat meets IRC meets torrents
- Globz 13y agoAwesome project! I love the feel and the sharing mechanics!
- taigeair 13y agoYeah I like it too.
- pearjuice 13y ago>paul graham dancing with bill gates 1999.jpg That escalated quickly.
- ElongatedTowel 13y agoYou count how many lines in the chat one has missed, but if you come back to the tab there is no indication where you left off. Might be useful.
- Raphmedia 13y agoIt's very nice for what's going on right now. I mean, a big internet orgy. However, the lack of private rooms pretty much kills it for me. Otherwise, it would have been perfect to use at work.
- asdad 13y agoIs the source for this available somewhere?
- diaz 13y agoVery nice and cool. Just one thing, I like to open links in a new background tab, so I just CTRL + click or just middle click with the mouse, the first option is not working the last one is fine.
- keypusher 13y agoThe spam right now is out of control, but it might die off in a few days. You should consider using http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/XKCD-SIGNAL http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/XKCD-SIGNAL mode for your chat.
- gcv 13y agoKeep it classy, Internet. Keep it classy.
- meritt 13y agoInteresting proof of concept although I personally prefer hipchat for a the "chatroom with group file sharing" benefit. The ephemeral nature of the downloads is really interesting though. I've seen a number of sites starting to target that niche (http://dissipateapp.com/ http://dissipateapp.com/ for file sharing specifically with "self-destructing" files) but mostly aimed at just messaging (like Snapchat or Frankly). Why risk putting your important documents on a site where it's only a matter of time before it's compromised? Most of the time once your recipient has the file it's safe to remove from the cloud.
- Chromozon 13y agoMight be desired behavior, but holding CRTL while clicking on a link in Firefox opens the link in a new tab, but it does not keep you on the main page. It's a bit annoying to click on a file and have to switch back to the homepage tab to get something else.
- fenollp 13y agoAlso press MAJ then, new tab should open in background ;
- Vekz 13y agoThis reminds me of the old school Napster. I think it could use an AV scanner on upload. Also a preview mode for images and documents and videos would be cool too.
- bigd 13y agoAWESOME I'm already addicted
- ww520 13y agoWhat's the bandwidth cost for this kind of app? I'm always afraid a popular rampup would incur a huge bandwidth bill for sites like this.
- Fundlab 13y agoIs there an upload limit? Is it possible to share a 5gb file?
- novaleaf 13y agolol. clicking on those pictures... "for adults only", "NSFW" good thing i'm the first one here this morning....