HN Explorer

Show HN: New project for on-demand chat rooms (urshoutbox.com)

37 points by tdondich ↗ HN
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc.

I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking.

The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get people discussing in real time. The idea came from looking at popular blogs and news sites which have comment sections where people are posting so quickly trying to have what appears to be almost real-time conversations in a limited way. This is meant to get those conversations in a more real-time appropriate environment.

Think of it as irc but for today's clients. I'm surprised that there wasn't really similar options out there. Most of today's chat tools are either mobile only, require video, or limit the number of participants. If you know of competitors in this space and I'm just an idiot for not finding them, please let me know.

I look forward to hearing people's thoughts.

35 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] thread
Syssiphus
You mean, like IRC?
tdondich
A bit, but more available to people and quick to share.
thevdude
There are plenty of web IRC clients.
lucb1e
And then it died :P

> The Chat Server connection was terminated.

> The Chat Server is currently unavailable.

jo_
That was my fault. I was fiddling around and played with sending some raw data over the socket, then it crashed.
jo_
I'm so sorry. I crashed your room. Can I send you an e-mail saying how I did it?

EDIT: I hesitate to post my e-mail to HN or to paste publicly how I did it, but it was trivial. Reply with your e-mail and I'll show you how I did it. It's probably a simple fix.

tdondich
Yes. Please do. taylor@urshoutbox.com
jo_
Sent. :)
lucb1e
I love how the last thing he said was "well I had to do some sanitization if I'm going to submit it to a place called Hacker News. Otherwise I'd get owned pretty quickly".
tdondich
Yep. That didn't take long!
lucb1e
Woops, there it goes again. This time the page says "Bummer." No files overwritten or..?!

Edit a minute later: and back.

dang
This post set off the voting ring detector, but I turned it off because we want to see original work on HN.

All: A voting ring is when people get their friends to upvote their posts. This is against the rules—we want stories because they're good, not because they're being promoted. Also, it's not in your interests to do, because even when we restore a post's rank, other penalties for ring-voting still apply.

Also, the OP included a long text description, but those don't show up when the story has a URL. You can post it as a comment in the thread. (tdondich, if you don't have the text handy anymore, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send it to you).

Falling3
How do you determine that it's a voting ring scenario? I'm not necessarily looking for specifics. Just wondering what the basis is for saying X upvotes came from friends. Or these two people are friends.
mike-cardwell
I logged in with a username that was a few hundred kilobytes long. Couple of seconds later the service goes down. Could just be a coincidence.
devindotcom
I love that the HN version of kicking the tires is a battery of exploits.
Artemis2
That's how you test a service: just put it on HN. If the traffic does not take it down, it's the hackers around here.
wildermuthn
My own chat site went down hard within minutes of hitting the HN front page. Hilarious in retrospect.
sneak
That's not an exploit, just a simple bug.
return0
I love how it amateurishly it crashes. could be a handy HN hangout place to vent or troll.

PS. Don't get me wrong people, i DO love it, but it just seems to crash too easily. These things happen to all of us. It could still be a cool place to hang out and vent on HN.

joshlegs
really wishing i had downvote powers right about now. since i dont, let me just pipe in with a comment about how arrogant this comment is. good software developers arent born, they're trained. you really should be constructive in your criticism.
return0
i provided enough constructive feedback to the maker on his chat.
joshlegs
cool. your original comment just came off very insulting and not terribly insightful/valuable. glad you gave him some pointers elsewhere
ANTSANTS
Good software developers also develop thick enough skin at some point to not take "your software is crashing a lot" personally.

Troll dens suck, but so do hugboxes.

tdondich
The old server crumbled due to unexpected popularity. The new one should be a bit more stable. Thanks for helping!
grageth
I'm sorry. I pasted all emoji's from the cheat sheet and it crashed...
tdondich
Heh, I'll need to put in a character limit. Thanks for the input!
gk1
It continues to ask me for a username, even after I tried several of varying lengths with simple alphanumerics. I'm on Chrome for Android, FWIW.
tdondich
I'm moving the server right now. Will give an update.
tdondich
I've moved the server to one with more resources. It should be back up now. :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
rayfranco
It makes safari cry on an iPhone.