Nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim

by ducktective • 5 years ago

172 106 5 years ago

svnpenn• 5 years ago

Thank goodness. I've always been confused by Discourse. Discourse was supposed to be the modern answer to all the homegrown PHP forum solutions of the previous decade. Instead, it just ended up being yet another bloated JavaScript web app. And given who the creator was, especially disappointing.

iamcreasy6• 5 years ago

Are you speaking from a developer or user perspective? As an user, I've always found Discourse to exceptionally user friendly and fluid to use. I find it a chore to navigate a forum that is not using Discourse.

nathcd• 5 years ago

Agreed. I was initially pretty turned off by the app-iness of Discourse, but after using it for awhile I've come around and actually enjoy it quite a bit now.

garaetjjte2• 5 years ago

Dynamic loading and their scroll hijacking makes Discourse horrible to browse.

mishac3• 5 years ago

The fact that discourse hijacks ctrl-f drives me insane. Sometimes I want to jump to a particular part of a thread featuring a word quickly, but discourse gets in the way.

And, though this is more subjective, I find the UI confusing. I end up browsing the github issues or even reddit for answers to questions just to avoid discourse on projects that use it (discuss.linuxcontainers.org - I'm looking at you).

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

It's an alternative to Discourse though, e.g. it's a SPA. Nothing I see in the description entices me in the least... and phpBB and others are still being developed, and still rock.

hlandau• 5 years ago

Blank page without JavaScript.

lazypenguin• 5 years ago

Discourse is great software and makes it so much easier to launch a forum but i personally never enjoyed the interface. Maybe I’m nostalgic, but I prefer the old style *BB interface with explicit categories/sections. Discourse kind of blurs the line with their “stream” style. This looks like an interesting alternative but unfortunately has a similar interface.

xook• 5 years ago

That blurred line is what turns me off from using Discourse-based forums. It's a neat idea, but it's too, as you say, “stream” styled.

The way I envision it is chat apps are yelling a question in a café, Discourse is walking into said café and setting down a sign then walking out, while classic forums are pinning a note in a library corkboard.

masklinn4• 5 years ago

Ditto, I can not stand discourse and am really sad any time I have to interact with it.

foresto2• 5 years ago

Discourse has always felt to me like standing on a riverbank and watching random things float by. It mostly works for comments on a blog post, but when I need to unearth specific information or want to participate in a discussion that spans weeks or years, I long for a more traditional forum. When faced with it as a tech support channel, I usually end up frustrated.

antifa2• 5 years ago

Do you mean discord? That sounds like why I prefer discourse/phpbb/etc. over things like Twitter and discord.

ksec• 5 years ago

That was my initial thought too, but after awhile I think it wasn't so much about the flow of conversation I have problem with, but its default design, style, spacing and layout.

And so I decide to check out Discourse again, turns out they Announced [1] a $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital. Congrats.

[1] https://blog.discourse.org/2021/08/discourse-series-a

ducktective3• 5 years ago

Discourse is dynamic and fun but:

1- There is excessive white-space everywhere (like every other modern web-app). I feel like it was designed as a mobile-first solution.

2- There could have been smarter features regarding gamification and karma. Currently you can only hit like button (the total like count of a user is not even visible)

3- If a post has many replies, it only shows them up until a certain point and you have to scroll down to view more. These javascript shenanigans should not exist in a forum app IMO.

I have never used a nimforum-based forum but a quick browse in https://forum.nim-lang.org/ shows that their UI is more dense (less white-space) which addresses point 1 above.

jtbayly• 5 years ago

the total like count of a user is not even visible

That’s wonderful. Definitely a fantastic decision to help prevent toxic conversations. So glad that “feature” doesn’t exist on Hacker News or in Discourse.

ducktective3• 5 years ago

But it does exist on HN. I can see you karma and after a while, the upvote count is visible.

When I ask a technical question on a forum, I'd like to know if a user who is deemed helpful in the community (by like count or `solved` count) is replying to me.

sullyj3• 5 years ago

1- There is excessive white-space everywhere (like every other modern web-app). I feel like it was designed as a mobile-first solution.

So many programmers have this obsession with interfaces having every available piece of information displayed all at once. I just don't understand the appeal. I find these sorts of interfaces confusing and overwhelming, I literally can't think straight when I look at them. I immediately forget what I was doing due to all the distractions.

rlp• 5 years ago

It highly depends on the use case. When people interact with a piece of software all day every day, they tend to appreciate having more information/actions available at a glance. Simple interfaces are better for casual users, but they generally mean more clicking around and tend to be slower to use for experts.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

Interesting. It generates some odd looking JS with a boatload of global vars. https://forum.nim-lang.org/js/forum.js?t=2020-08-2420%3A22%3...

dom964• 5 years ago

The forum's frontend and backend are both written in Nim, so what you're seeing is the JavaScript that Nim generates.

Could definitely use a lot of minification.

ptx2• 5 years ago

Having all those globals in the code generated by the Nim compiler seems less than ideal, though. Especially since some of them have very generic names like "raiseException" and "addInt", which could conceivably conflict with some other JS library.

greyivy• 5 years ago

Oh yikes. Can anyone shed some light on what this is about?

tyingq3• 5 years ago

Nim compiles to C, but can also compile to JS:

https://nim-lang.org/docs/backends.html#backends-the-javascr...

It appears that the way it does that creates a lot of global vars and functions.

stardenburden• 5 years ago

This seems nice, loads fast on my slow connection.

But there don't seem to be filters, like only showing posts older than a certain date. Or with a certain comment threshold.

ilaksh• 5 years ago

Nim has been using this forum for years. It's been very solid as far as I can tell.

In case there are any programmers in this comment thread, more interesting to me than the amount of whitespace or how similar the interface is to Discourse, is the source code. It's a great example of the power of the Nim language for application programming.

zelphirkalt3• 5 years ago

What annoys me most about Discourse are the following things:

No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an indication can be seen, that JS is required and it is waaay off of anything having a non JS fallback.

The above also means, that any knowledge in there will not be found via search engines. I have had it happen, that there was a forum of some community, and I did not even know it existed, even though I searched loads of stuff about the project. It simply never appeared in any search result ever. It is not discoverable.

Aside from not being discoverable, I find that any traditional forum software works better than discourse. For example I cannot properly see when exactly a reply was written, because it abstacts from a simple timestamp and shows only a month and year for example.

lf-non3• 5 years ago

I find that any traditional forum software works better than discourse. For example I cannot properly see when exactly a reply was written, because it abstacts from a simple timestamp and shows only a month and year for example.

Yes, I agree. I like the FluxBB based forum that Arch community uses and find the look & feel a good balance between excessive use of whitespace and overly cramped UIs.

No JS no joy. You see a completely white page, because none of it works without JS, not even an indication can be seen, that JS is required and it is waaay off of anything having a non JS fallback.

I am not sure if this is configurable but the official kotlin forum [1] uses discourse and I can see the content when js is disabled. A lot of interactivity is disabled but the footer does have a clear message that the site is best viewed with js enabled.

I have often found kotlin forum posts through google search, so there doesn't seem to be any issue on the SEO front.

[1] https://discuss.kotlinlang.org

codinghorror• 5 years ago

You are thinking of Nim with the white page; Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it! And of course everything is searchable. We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google.

As for the timestamp, click or hover over the timestamp to see the full date/time, etc.

zelphirkalt3• 5 years ago

Don't take this the wrong way: Being indexed by Google does not add anything for me personally, as I am not using Google. If there is a forum, which can only currently be indexed by Google, then I might even see that as harmful to the web in general, as it adds incentive to users to use Google, instead of other search engines.

I have experienced it multiple times, that stuff is only in some discourse forum and I see a blank white page. Basically a JS-wall. Not sure, if the people, who hosted it did something weird to cause that issue, but that is the impression I have of discourse forums. Rarely I allow its scripts to run and make the effort to view some content in any such forum. Usually I just close the tab.

Edit: Now I know why I might have had that experience: I also block loads of third party CDNs. Perhaps they were trying to load scripts and resources from there and that's why nothing was shown.

Edit2: But you are also correct: The Nim one does not show anything without JS.

a5aAqU• 5 years ago

Discourse often shows a blank page with certain ad-blockers. JS is enabled, but the Discourse CDN gets blocked, so nothing displays unless the ad-blocking setting is overridden for that site. Some sites do load HTML, but others are blank.

duskwuff• 5 years ago

We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google.

Google's crawler can index JS-only content just fine:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang....

stonewareslord• 5 years ago

With javascript disabled on mobile, you just get a header with links that don't work and "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" even on the official https://try.discourse.org/ site

What I don't understand is why discourse can't serve up content that isn't interactive. I get lazy loading if there are >1000 comments on a post, but for anything else, static content should be perfectly fine. Even when you have js on, ctrlf doesn't work because of dynamic loading so the site has to hijack the shortcut with different interaction patterns (pressing enter doesn't go to next result, it loads a separate page).

I just tested with the 999 comment post on that site. First page load with no cache is 5.98MB (1.25MB) and took 5.76s load time. Holding the end key to get to the bottom until I hit the last post downloads a total of 1.91MB (718KB transfer) and takes 70s! That's including all the pictures. That cannot be better than than loading all text and optionally deferring all img loads, right?

jorams• 5 years ago

Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it!

The only content is in a <noscript> tag, so this complaint is probably coming from people only blocking third party JS.

When reading a random Discourse forum I don't intend to participate in, blocking all JS usually results in a smoother experience than accepting scripts from discourse-cdn.com. The only exception I've found is for massive threads, because there's no JS-free search.

chrismorgan2• 5 years ago

I disable JS by default and had enabled JS for a couple of Discourse sites I read, but once it started working without JS I gladly disabled JS again because I find the consumption experience quite a bit better sans-JS: faster and more consistent with how the rest of the web works.

winrid• 5 years ago

FWIW JS apps are indexed by Google. I run FastComments, and the JS rendered comment threads are indexed.

freediver2• 5 years ago

Because this is coming from nim and nim design goals are to be efficient and elegant I can not help but notice the excessive bloat. The main forum page is 4MB of data (~700kb compressed) to basically communicate 3KB of information (plus avatar images which should not be more than few kb total anyway).

This is still better than original Discourse which for this same thing needs 6MB of data (1.2MB compressed). However Discourse does not claim to be efficient or elegant.

This kind of web performance engineering attention to detail will go a long way. The benefits for users on slower connections are particularly important. And as an engineer, showing few KBs of information with few MBs of data should bother you. Your information to data ratio is less than 1%. Excessive reliance on JS does not help. The best way to think about JS is as a feature enhancer not a feature requirement.

Having said that I think it is absolutely great that you are doing this and I hope we can get efficient and elegant forum software. This will certainly help nim adoption if executed in the way that is true to your values.

Edit: A competitor has been mentioned in comments:

https://fluxbb.org/forums/index.php

They are showing similar amount of information in "only" 100KB of total data. And 80% of it is CSS (which does seem excessive for what it does, I am sure 5KB of CSS would do the same job taking that page to amazing 25KB of total data).

masklinn4• 5 years ago

Because this is coming from nim and nim design goals are to be efficient and elegant I can not help but notice the excessive bloat. The main forum page is 4MB of data (~700kb compressed) to basically communicate 3KB of information (plus avatar images which should not be more than few kb total anyway).

As a basis of comparison, HN's home is 43k, and old.reddit.com is currently 3.16MB including all assets, the sole markup is 363K (gzip'd to 104).

tyingq3• 5 years ago

3MB of the 4MB data appears to be JS, and a lot of that repeated calls to recaptcha_en.js, which would be cached after the first call. Though I don't know if all those repeated calls are really needed.

khaledh• 5 years ago

Most of the 4.2MB of data is cacheable; only ~128KB gets re-downloaded on subsequent visits (about 100KB of which has to do with Google recaptcha). With compression, what actually gets downloaded on subsequent vists is on the order of ~60KB.

That being said, I agree that the web is bloated and needs to go on a diet. We just need to be careful on where to spend our energy for optimization (caches are great and we should rely on them).

freediver2• 5 years ago

In principle I do not share that view. The browser does not start with this data cached. You actually need to load all of it. On a slow connection you may give up and never come again to reach a cached-load scenario. It is a lose-lose scenario. IMO cache should be used to make an already fast page lightning fast.

Web perfomance optimization tells me a lot about a product and its priorities. I do not mind bloated products that perform a certain function well for their users and never try to pretend to be optimial from an engineering standpoint.

But this is nim, language that markets itself as efficient and elegant, and execution like this can hurt their credibility and brand perception in the very community they are trying to market themselves in (developers).

wizzwizz42• 5 years ago

caches are great and we should rely on them

Caches hang or crash my browser. Please don't. (Amazon Kindle Paperwhite – yes, this has been my only web browser several times – no, I will not replace it with another Kindle when it breaks)

emptysongglass2• 5 years ago

Can someone point me to forum/message board software that doesn't use JS at all? Like Sourcehut but for forums.

thewakalix• 5 years ago

phpBB gets pretty close to this; although it does use JS for a few niceties, it’s not just usable but almost identical when JS is disabled (IIRC).

lf-non3• 5 years ago

FluxBB [1], the PHP based forum that powers the Archlinux wiki works fine without JS, and IMHO looks fine too.

If you are looking for something minimal with threading support, fossil scm [2] includes a forum. You can checkout the forum for fossil itself which is powered by fossil.

[1] https://fluxbb.org

[2] https://fossil-scm.org/

[3] https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forummain

ijlx• 5 years ago

Arch forum, you mean? The archwiki runs the standard mediawiki.

epilys3• 5 years ago

I recently wrote one: https://github.com/epilys/sic

emptysongglass2• 5 years ago

I am loving this, thanks for sharing. My only request would be for a publicly hosted image so I can easily selfhost for my own little campfire community.

e12e2• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing, I missed your earlier "show hn": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086637

As someone not too familiar with Django, this looks like a nice codebase :)

But am I right that there are no tests?

goodpoint• 5 years ago

Python, AGPL and without JS? Excellent!

fswwi4• 5 years ago

This one doesn't use JS at all: http://pfpmd7dd5ijt4add2sfi4djsaij4u3ebvnwvyvuj6aeipe2f5llpt...

mhh__• 5 years ago

DFeed, the program that runs forum.dlang.org might be of relevance to this discussion

fswwi4• 5 years ago

There's also a lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Rust: http://pfpmd7dd5ijt4add2sfi4djsaij4u3ebvnwvyvuj6aeipe2f5llpt...

(You have to install Tor Browser to open these onion links https://www.torproject.org/download/)

The source code is open - GPLv3 License.

antifa2• 5 years ago

Does it literally have no presence outside of Tor? Most people really don't want to download an extra browser just to see a random software project.

fswwi4• 5 years ago

Yes, it has no presence outside of Tor. More people should know about Tor and use it.

(There are clearnet->tor gates, but you should not use them.)

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

Is there a clearnet repo? Or a name for the project perhaps so I can look for a clone?

fswwi4• 5 years ago

No. Install Tor. That's the only way. The name of the project is pfpmd.

(There are clearnet->tor gates, but you should not use them.)

lostdog2• 5 years ago

I tried out Nim earlier this year. Great language, but the forum was very frustrating to use.

Every page takes a few seconds to load. If you open a page in a new tab, you still need to wait for it to load when you switch to the tab. The forum was the most annoying thing about using the language.

Go try it out: https://forum.nim-lang.org/

dom964• 5 years ago

huh, that's strange. I've never seen any page on the forum take longer than a few ms to load. Just navigated through a couple of threads and all appeared nearly instantenously. Can you share a bit more about your hardware/setup?

gunapologist99• 5 years ago

I definitely see a discernible delay, on some pages more than others. Measuring on a heavier page (https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/1207) produced a result of more than seven seconds for a full page load, but to full readable load / DOM mostly complete (if I wasn't watching devtools, I would have figured it was fully loaded) was only around two seconds. Definitely not just a few ms, though.

lostdog2• 5 years ago

The machine is a 4 year old, very lightweight laptop, running Ubuntu, with Chrome.

I'm regularly seeing 500ms on page loads. Very frustrating when you open pages in new tabs, but they're not loaded when you go to switch over.

jhoechtl• 5 years ago

Nim looks cool. Is there somewhere a "concepts" documentation? Not in the sense of language concepts but "environment" concepts.

How is code generated? Using llvm-lib, transpiling to C, js?

Interaction with other libraries?

Celeo• 5 years ago

Here[1], perhaps?

transpiling to C, js

Yes to both of these.

[1] https://nim-lang.org/features.html

sim_card_map2• 5 years ago

Doesn't work without JS.

Pass.

westurner• 5 years ago

awesome-selfhosted > "Communication - Social Networks and Forums" doesn't yet link to Nimforum: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#com...

sebyx07• 5 years ago

keep up the good work nims

lenkite• 5 years ago

Never liked Discourse's UI. I so wish there was an OSS discussion forum software like old reddit.

Nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim

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