built in remix.run with a Python backend, basementcommunity is a nod to early forums from the early 2000s like something awful and fark, focusing on manual moderation and discussions happen in chronological order
I like it. Never noticed a forum with a wall of shame before even though I lurked on a few old skool car forums in the mid-2000s.
I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
I've been playing around with remix and i come from a python backend. would love to know more about how you mix these two ?. Is the backend essentially just a rest API with a handoff to remix for rendering ?.
Why Remix with a Python backend? Did you need Python for anything specific? Is there some specific need that a pure Remix backend couldn’t give you? Just curious.
actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution.
honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI.
It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off.
If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes
As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade.
It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice on tech careers by a mile. Blunt, harsh advice there has been life-changing.
Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.
Exactly, Reddit and HN are pretty decent replacements for Slashdot and the like for discussing the day's news, but they're not places for long term projects, megathreads, etc.
vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up.
Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them
and turned our society into a giant flame war
Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.
Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly.
I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
Twitter has way less moderation than probably any Vbulletin site. The key is not tripping the algos. But otherwise, you can get away with a lot. There is no such thing as a 'twitter admin' or 'dm the mods' like there is with a regular forum.
Why wait? AWS and DigitalOcean are dirt cheap. Go set something up and have fun. A number of communities have already forked from Reddit and seem to be doing just fine. As long as you have something interesting to talk about then people will come.
I built an “ssh shell” with this in mind. It’s actually just a hello world app that prompts for your name, because it turns out that’s all you need. Someday I may build a modern BBS via ssh.
Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern.
I already moved from reddit to neogaf.
It's nice - nobody bans you for saying that GTA should not be censored. And discussions about politics are banned.
Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing.
It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back.
Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.
It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.
I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.
UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation.
The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.
Performance is part of design in software, much like how button feel is part of industrial design, or fabric qualities are part of fashion design. But I also see what you mean, you were talking about visual design.
Loading and performance behind loading states are UI concerns, especially on a big distributed system like the modern web. Perhaps you allow native browser elements to provide that UI, perhaps customize it somehow, but a UI designer must consider how the page fills as data arrives. Do you do the ‘spinner hell’ thing? Keep it blank? FOUC? Show cache and update? These are primary UI concerns.
I would say responsiveness is the number 1 most important UI property. At least for me.
The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.
thanks! yeah it's definitely not COMPLETELY true-to-form because i still do think a lot of modern design works for a reason, but i appreciate the words!
that's actually one thing that I don't like about it. it looks like every other generic corporate website or Wordpress template, and certainly nothing like the forums I remember.
I agree with this, also because of the following reason: Wow! A forum, that does not only show a white page, when having JS disabled! The usual current crop of forum software will not even render anything, if you don't allow 3 CDNs and some third party JS to run.
Hacker News is like a late '90s forum in terms of minimalism, but it has a sick backend. same for Wikipedia and craigslist. That is usually how it is: simple frontend, technical backend
The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO.
The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.
Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)
I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion.
Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft.
I guess I'm conflating a few different things here.
I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).
A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS.
For this reason I prefer JIRA
comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication.
An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum.
ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out”
But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!
I've been thinking about "ephemeral Slack" the last few weeks after a flurry of posts about Slack and workplace communication.
I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation.
I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve.
Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself).
I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication.
Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
We had an amazing internal 'social media' site at VMware that was basically used like an old-school forum (Socialcast), but then the legal department nuked everything older than ~1 year old, obliterating a huge and beneficial source of org knowledge and more or less ruining the use case (you usually could find an answer for anything you needed, or figure out who to talk to about it if not).
VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.
Anyone play World of Warcraft back in the day? Remember Elitist Jerks, their forum? Great place for solid gameplay discussion. And the general social threads in the Benefactors Bar were excellent. They had strict writing rules and moderators enforced the use of good grammar and complete sentences.
"Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized."
Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me.
Glorious times.
But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display.
Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.
I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds.
I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.
This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required.
Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).
Oh you saw that thread by poster 'aaaaa' also? I registered just to tell them to fuck off but by the time I did the thread had been deleted. Way to go moderation!
It seems the forum is too generic, has no specialization, and has no seeded curated content.
So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off.
I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow.
Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
Yeah it wasn't the guy's username at the time that was the issue, it was the content of the thread he created but I wasn't going to repeat it in polite company here.
I didn’t see what was posted, but I feel like if one’s the type to be bothered by slurs, a self described 2000s style forum probably isn’t what I’d recommend.
That looks awesome!
I do miss the "old" web2.0 with it's forums, message boards and the characistic designs.
I always appreciate any throwback/retro web projects! Great work!
i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
Yeesh. Sad that people seem so determined to prove that you can't have nice things. Hopefully you don't get too discouraged. Happy though that you let my registration through. Kind of expected that my habit of using random usernames would get me flagged.
I had this random idea where I could start a new forum like this, but make it appear popular by seeding it with hundreds of users who are just ChatGPT. Wouldn't be surprised if this is already being done by some sites. Dead Internet Theory is real.
I actually came across sites like that before, although the coherency of the posts were definitely far worse than ChatGPT as that was before its invention. Looked more like the typical SEO spam than anything else.
244 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadI do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
- Remix server - API server
When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI.
It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off.
If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
I've been thinking of rebooting a crappy club for jerks and this looks like it could be a great jumping off point if you'd be willing to share
How is the SEO? Seems like poor SEO (never mind Reddit) was one of the reasons they really fell off the map.
It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up.
Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)
> Thread locked: use the search function next time
followed by...
> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)
> Thread locked: don't necropost
:^)
Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern.
https://github.com/codazoda/goshell
I also like the sports board title (though, technically, it should be "we like sportz").
It's very pleasant to browse.
Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.
It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.
The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.
Maybe the real question is does this engine provide easy and performant template management? (Site is currently down can't lookup now)
The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.
Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)
All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.
Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft.
I guess I'm conflating a few different things here.
I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS.
For this reason I prefer JIRA comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication.
An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum.
ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out”
But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!
I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation.
I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve.
Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself).
I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication.
Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
After that phpbb-style forum suddenly becomes way more interesting than before.
VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.
[0] https://baensbar.net/ but you'll have to register to see anything good
https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjer...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjer...
"Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized."
Gold.
But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display.
Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.
I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.
This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required.
Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).
So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off. I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow.
Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
The reason given for the ban that the user has used Dostoevsky's book title as his handle name.
There are far worse usernames than idiot on there.
Wut? It would have been nice to know this before I spent effort filling out all information and generating a password.
May be worth showing that message on the registration page right from the start if/when registrations are turned off.
Anyway, I made a pending account now :)
Site looks great, btw.