Ask HN: real time forum software?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968085

by Skywing • 16 years ago

10 20 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do any real-time forum platforms exist? Forums where threads and posts appear in real time? If not, would there be an audience for such software? What kind of things would have to be avoided for this type of forum to prosper?

What do you think?

MurkyPast• 16 years ago

I think it's been around for a couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC

Skywing4• 16 years ago

I'm aware of IRC. I've hosted my own IRC server since 1999. But, I wasn't asking about IRC. Although, IRC is my inspiration for this question. I'm talking about a forum, accessible from the web obviously.

shaunxcode• 16 years ago

I assume you mean something like the front page of hacker news but where you could watch the positions/scores change and old items fade out as new ones take their place? I think that would be pretty slick. However I can imagine people wanting a "pause" button in case they don't appreciate the idea of things they were planning on clicking on disappearing. Were you planning on implementing this?

Uhhrrr• 16 years ago

Right now, if you're responding to something on most forums (Stack Overflow excepted?), you can't see other responses which have come in while you're typing (not on the same page, anyway). I think a few years from now this will seem like the horribly broken behavior that it is. I wish you well.

brudgers• 16 years ago

I've used BB/forums which indicated new posts that came in during the time taken to compose a post. 98% of the time, it was just in the way.

zalew3• 16 years ago

would there be an audience for such software?

I believe it will be hard to get audience from most existing forums, as I see most phpbb, invision, etc. aren't rushing to move f.ex. to vanilla. Most of this software is outdated and bloated, yet they have a huge ecosystem (extensions, tutorials) and userbase used to their functionality. Such product should at least provide an easy convertion schema and default themes similar to existing competition's defaults. Still it would take very long until it gained a reasonable market share IMO. If you're looking just for new market, it could succeed.

I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)

Skywing4• 16 years ago

"I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)"

Agreed. :P

I don't see why people couldn't theme a forum like this, too. Perhaps also some sort of data migration tool.

Forums just kind of need a revamping!

zalew3• 16 years ago

> Forums just kind of need a revamping!

That's absolutely true, I was happy after punbb appeared and later vanilla, but I know how hard it's to make even simple updates when you have a big community. I help run a 7yr old huge automotive forum and even a phpbb2->3 upgrade caused riots, I have no idea what happens when someone would switch a huge community from bb or invision to an exotic platform :)

olalonde• 16 years ago

Check out http://www.boonex.com, they have a pretty much real time forum.

rahulchaudhary• 16 years ago

Have you looked at http://www.ninjapost.com/ ?

msencenb• 16 years ago

Upvoted. Mike (one of the founders) is a great guy and very helpful. I currently run ninjapost at my startup (details in profile if you want to check ninjapost out).

ninjapost• 16 years ago

Thanks, rahulchaudhary!

Skywing, I am the founder of Ninja Post. Ping me with any questions - mike@ninjapost.com or try the demo forum: http://forum.ninjapost.com

ligerhearted• 16 years ago

Friendfeed.

nailer• 16 years ago

Yes, I run one at imeveryone.com. Click on the 'Live' section.

imp• 16 years ago

There's a guy making a real-time fantasy football forum called SleeperBot: http://www.sleeperbot.com/. It's pretty cool. The success of one would probably depend on what it's being used for. The SleeperBot forums are great when football games are running. You would probably need some sort of reason to have a 'live' forum instead of a standard one.

sdrinf• 16 years ago

Forums aren't a software problem -they are inherently a sociological issue: community building & forming, spam filtering, navigating the political intentions, etc. If there's a single conclusion of Google Wave, it's that being "realtime" makes no guarantees for quality, and signal/noise; but makes management of such extremely more harder.

lalc• 16 years ago

Yep: http://pixplz.com/

Ask HN: real time forum software?

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