Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

by demindiro • 4 years ago

392 155 4 years ago

Hello HN!

I've found my SQL knowledge to be lacking, so I made a project that uses SQLite as a backend.

As it is intended for self-hosting I aim to make it easy to set up and maintain. Getting it up & running takes no more than a few commands (bar setting up a proxy such as nginx, which is out of scope).

I've set up a "demo" site at https://forum.agreper.com/ if you want to try out the UI.

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS.

I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, phpBB still sortof supports having javascript disabled [1] but it is nowhere near as lightweight as the example here created by demindiro.

I also commend demindiro on not requiring JS. It is refreshing to see simple yet useful applications.

[1] https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245

make_me_rich• 4 years ago

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh

EDITED: *conversations

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.

dspillett• 4 years ago

find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

This is not new, it just isn't applied to web based forums as much as I (someone who likes threaded discussions like that) would like. For small discussions it make little difference, for large branching threads it can help greatly when you don't care to follow all the sub-threads. It was not uncommon in Usenet clients back in the day. Of course it needs to be coupled with good UI for collapsing branches and otherwise navigating the tree, and perhaps a chronological view option for issue who prefer that (or a tree-view with posts spaced by arrival order for the best of both of you do it right - I had a reader that did that but can't currently remember it's name).

dmitriid2• 4 years ago

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other.

But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion.

Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now.

[1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952

com2kid4• 4 years ago

I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability.

Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem.

Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond.

Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)

cygx• 4 years ago

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

I find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.

IshKebab2• 4 years ago

I too miss the good old days where the information you wanted was buried somewhere in a 100 page phpBB thread and you had to manually search through it 1 page at a time, with each one-line comment taking up half the page with avatars and signatures.

Good times. Sad that things have moved on to systems that don't suck quite so much but that's progress for you.

deniska• 4 years ago

My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.

fuzzy22• 4 years ago

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again?

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason?

Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t.

Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

snek_case2• 4 years ago

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

ZuLuuuuuu• 4 years ago

Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style.

Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.

FunnyLookinHat• 4 years ago

I also miss the days of good ole server-side rendered applications. I'm not sure the author's history or work experience, but, if I built something like this, I'd likely find it extremely cathartic compared to most tech stacks nowadays. :-)

gosukiwi• 4 years ago

PHPBB

INTPenis• 4 years ago

I loved PunBB. 18 years ago at my first IT job I actually stole PunBBs design to make the control panel for our web hosting company. Nobody knew because even then punbb was kinda esoteric.

skilled2• 4 years ago

For that era, FluxBB/PunBB weren't even that great. I think phpBB/vBulletin took the cake (as was evident by the number of forums run by the said software), and of course, IPB was also nice but came with a steep price by comparison.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

I do still wonder why the fast and responsive software can't invest a little bit into design in order to not look like complete shit.

Sure something like phpBB is light, but the UX is also barely usable. Give me something like Reddit or Discourse over that any day. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

Hackernews on the other hand manages to lack both (in some speculations intentionally), with neither usable design nor speed.

alxlaz• 4 years ago

There is a considerable cultural overlap between "people who think no-JS, fast and responsive software is cool" and "people who think the design of Reddit or Discourse is really awful". (Man, especially Reddit, I swear the day they retire old.reddit.com will be the day I stop using it). They probably are investing a little bit into design, just not the one you like.

bulatb• 4 years ago

FOSS tends to treat aesthetics like developers complain executives treat software quality: This doesn't help me. Why does it matter? Why should I care? I see no difference.

Improving either is an uphill battle when decision makers don't value the work, at best, or at worst are committed to resistance. And you don't even get paid.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

The point of no-js is mainly to avoid client-side tracking, right?

Can't you do a lot of that with CSS?

chatterhead• 4 years ago

Wonderful job!

ftth_finland2• 4 years ago

I dislike forums which indent successive replies.

I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads.

The proper way of handling replies is to post them under each other and support quoting.

demindiro7• 4 years ago

I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads.

[-] should collapse subthreads. Caveat is that the browser doesn't remember which subthreads were collapsed due to no-JS.

have_faith2• 4 years ago

Not if each "collapse" link reloads the page and at the same time stores the preference in the backend against your username so that subsequent page loads know what to hide (:

ftth_finland2• 4 years ago

I stand corrected.

I did not recognize the [-] as it looks like some weird emoji on my mobile browser due to the too small and uncentered background.

MetaWhirledPeas2• 4 years ago

That's just, like, your opinion man. I prefer HN's indented approach to a typical forum listing where it's just a firehose with quotes. But the best approach is to allow the view to be switched as desired.

eterm• 4 years ago

HN's model is bad for high volume. Sometimes on HN you only get one top level reply on the whole page because once it puts the top top-level reply it then puts all the replies to that above the next top-level reply.

So you get a vast amount of low quality replies above the next high-quality reply.

For low volume it works okay because you can manually collapse but for high volume once it starts paging it breaks down and you just get further into the top level comment without properly being able to escape.

Reddit's model of auto-collapsing so you get a mix of threads and top-level replies is much better for picking out the better responses.

JasonFruit• 4 years ago

The problem with letting users choose the view is that the chosen view affects how they write. If I can see it's obvious in my tree view who I'm responding to, I won't point it out, and then someone who uses the firehose view won't be able to follow the conversation.

lsbehe2• 4 years ago

Very nice work.

bmacho2• 4 years ago

Teddit works like a charm with disabled javascript, it supports css based thread collapsing, and cookie based information for logged out users as well (you can store which subreddits you follow).

ratww4• 4 years ago

it supports css based thread collapsing

I didn't knew but I love it... I wish more developers took interest in such things.

bmacho2• 4 years ago

.. actually it uses the summary/details html tags, but the same thing is totally doable with css checkboxes and visibility too.

ms123• 4 years ago

Love it! I built one using go (https://git.sr.ht/~m15o/vpub) and it powers https://forum.status.cafe/

Thanks for sharing it :)

lsbehe2• 4 years ago

It's not caching the stylesheet. If you plan on updating it a lot you should still enable caching and e.g. increment a url parameter every time you change it (like style.css?v=3).

pablo1• 4 years ago

Is it still being maintained? Do you accept PR's? I tried to register on the forum to ask, but my user has not been activated.

zhte415• 4 years ago

Looks great. If you wanted to extend it with JS, HTMX or lightweight functions easily added to Flask, which is imho the right way for CRUD.

And specifically, looks great - clearly outlined, threaded, indented, flow of conversation.

m00dy• 4 years ago

is it missing captcha ?

benbristow• 4 years ago

Has a CAPTCHA but it can be solved pretty easily (paste into Dev Tools console)...

  const input = document.querySelector('body > main > form > table > tbody > tr:nth-child(3) > td:nth-child(2) > input');
  const challenge = document.querySelector('body > main > form > table > tbody > tr:nth-child(3) > td:nth-child(1)').innerText.split('=')[0];
  input.value = eval(challenge);

barefeg• 4 years ago

Out of curiously, does HN use JS heavily? It feels quite lightweight, and it’s sort of a forum

lifthrasiir• 4 years ago

Very sparingly: https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js

I'm pretty okay with that, my only complaint is that when you vote a comment or story it creates an invisible image with a voting URL, which may be loaded much later so the click may not register from time to time.

donio• 4 years ago

And all of it is optional. You can do all operations (readinig, posting, commenting, voting, flagging) with JS disabled, you just get page loads rather than dynamic updates.

genericacct• 4 years ago

IMHO one of the best features a modern web forum sw can provide is browser notifications

foofoo4u• 4 years ago

This is great. I want to see more of the web to be like this. Simple, direct, light, and functional. I've came to learn on this thread alone that other projects such as teddit and nitter exist, which capture this same spirit. I'd like to know if other projects for popular sites exist as well. Someone should make an aggregation of sites and open source libraries like https://github.com/Demindiro/agreper that exist.

altilunium• 4 years ago

bearblog & prose.sh came to mind (minimal blog system). For chat, we got https://github.com/altilunium/darkhallv3

sh4nks• 4 years ago

Nice! I built one with Flask as well :-)

derekzhouzhen• 4 years ago

What innovation do you have to make a moderator's job easier?

I ask because I believe this is the hardest part of a forum software; The one thing that make or break a community is whether there is timely and fair moderation so contents are fresh and relevant.

demindiro7• 4 years ago

Currently there aren't many moderation features - only banning and removing threads & comments are implemented right now. Registrations can be disabled by the admin.

I will definitely focus on having good moderation features as I also believe it is essential for a healthy forum.

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

Love the HN-like design. How do you handle big threads and many nested replies?

demindiro7• 4 years ago

Currently not at all. All comments in a thread are loaded.

I do intend to add pagination but I'm not sure what a clean implementation would look like.

ad404b8a372f2b92• 4 years ago

I love it. And it's telling of modern practices that it's one of the fastest forum I've used in the past few years, you click and the page instantly appears!

Do you intend to extend it and keep working on it or was it just a one off project?

lolinder2• 4 years ago

And it's telling of modern practices that it's one of the fastest forum I've used in the past few years, you click and the page instantly appears!

"Modern practices make for slow apps" is a common trope on HN, but it's important to note that it's not just modern practices that make modern web apps feel slow; modern feature sets are the larger culprit.

This app could be a React SPA and it would still be faster than most forums you've used because it intentionally has a minimal feature set.

GoblinSlayer• 4 years ago

Feature set is absolutely design practice.

ad404b8a372f2b92• 4 years ago

I don't buy that for a second to be honest.

Modern forums haven't innovated all that much, you have infinite scrolls, notifications and live updates, that's all that I can think of, off the top of my head. If you go on the main page of a modern forum and a Phpbb one they'll be functionally equivalent for the end user.

And even if they had innovated, you can put as big a feature set as you want on the backend and not send 20Mb of JavaScript along with a single request per post and your page will load instantly.

And that's not even going into all the websites which are entirely featureless, I regularly see SAAS landing pages that take over a minute to fully load, that's just to display text and images.

Maybe the stack is capable of being fast and light theoretically but it never is in practice.

demindiro7• 4 years ago

I will keep working on it. There is a lot more interest than I anticipated.

rexreed• 4 years ago

It feels very retro - back to the earlier days of the web circa what Craigslist still looks like. Are you doing this just for development experience / fun or to make it something bigger? I still find no-JS back-end forums such as PHPBB and similar to still be useful. People are still running vBulletin. These systems are all very robust and handle moderation and many other forum-related must haves. Are you looking to build those as well?

It definitely feels like we're going full circle with the Web and back to its earlier, decentralized, stripped-down past.

93po• 4 years ago

Very fast. Really like it.

Xeoncross• 4 years ago

That reminded me of the 1KB forum: https://nerdparadise.com/programming/phpforum

I actually shortened it, expanded it to add bot detection and published the update also under 1KB: https://gist.github.com/Xeoncross/1503594

Such abuse PHP could handle back then.

leviathan• 4 years ago

Holy sql injection Batman

bdlowery• 4 years ago

You should fix it so there’s no sql injection :D

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

I thought for a minute this was going to link to news.ycombinator.com!

cxr• 4 years ago

HN is not "no-JS web forum software".

Kiro• 4 years ago

HN uses JS.

MarcellusDrum• 4 years ago

Optionally. The site works just fine with JS disabled.

jamesmccann• 4 years ago

This is a cool project! One small suggestion: the native blue links for the author name, "thread", and "reply" make the content hard to focus on as the UI is quite intrusive. HN solves this quite well with a colour scheme that has the comment content as the most prominent element in a thread.

nathias• 4 years ago

very cool forum

Aperocky3• 4 years ago

May I recommend an ORM for any such project? hand rolling SQL statement aren't going to scale.

Here's my shameless plug: `pip install sqlitedao`: https://github.com/Aperocky/sqlitedao

softfalcon• 4 years ago

Not trying to bash your ORM as it could have a great translation layer to make optimal queries.

my experience optimizing SQL has been removing the ORM layer via hand rolling SQL queries.

Most of my peers also seem to agree that ORM is great for knocking a feature out, but you’ll inevitably run into performance concerns at scale and need to write your own optimized queries yourself.

I feel like with SQLite having limited resources, you’d likely want to optimize your queries as best you can without an ORM? Is that not the case?

Aperocky3• 4 years ago

A well thought out ORM would consider for performance, obviously if you're just retrieving a particular string then manual SQL might have a few times speed lead.

The fundamental issue with both handrolled SQL and ORM is inefficient queries leading to linearly increasing time consumption. for instance usage of `LIMIT` and accidentally querying on non-indexed fields. But I don't see how this differentiate the 2 as I have seen it happen in both situations professionally.

A good ORM enforces certain behaviors, specifically querying by index and constant time pagination. This guards against accidental querying behaviors.

tonetheman• 4 years ago

My experience is the exact opposite.

ORM's never scale and you end up with hand written SQL long term. Unless it is really just a CRUD app then ORM's really work fairly well.

Aperocky3• 4 years ago

On a personal and professional level it has been the opposite case for me.

bityard• 4 years ago

I get the impression that OP's project is not aiming for scale.

egberts1• 4 years ago

i worry about spammers coming across my soon-to-be-hosted forum. What mechanism can one do to prevent fraudulent signups?

demindiro7• 4 years ago

There are currently two mechanisms:

- A weak CAPTCHA that will be replaced with something stronger (probably image-based)

- Disabling registrations

aimor• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. I've been writing my own simple websites for a couple years now and I really like seeing what other people have done. Sometimes I learn better ways to do things, and sometimes I realize what I did was perfectly acceptable.

sirsinsalot• 4 years ago

It's absolutely beautiful. Within a fraction of a second, I knew what it was and how to use it and how much value it has.

l-portet• 4 years ago

Cool project, is there a theme feature?

demindiro7• 4 years ago

There is currently only one theme. I do intend to add support for custom themes though.

throwaway81523• 4 years ago

It's always nice to hear about someone writing a cool program just because they felt like doing so. Every time I think about writing a forum server, I find I return to the thought that Usenet was better, and that if I wanted a web forum, I'd consider putting a web front end on an NNTP server. That would among other things let people keep using NNTP clients (I like gnus.el) if they don't want to use a browser. There are a bunch of NNTP web clients already, but afaict they all needlessly suck.

You might take a look at Fossil (fossil-scm.org) which is not a forum, but is an all-in-one source control system, bug tracker, wiki, and web backend, all implemented as an SQLite client written in C. Its blurb says a scripting language might sound more attractive than C superficially, but in Fossil, SQLite does all the heavy lifting that would otherwise have been done with scripts. On my bottomless todo list I want to study its implementation sometime, since I think it would be a good example of "advanced" uses of SQL and SQLite. That is completely independent of Fossil's purpose as a VCS application. I'm ok at basic SQL but not so clueful about sophisticated uses.

One thing to watch out for is that since SQLite is an embedded DB, when you make an SQlite query, the overhead is basically a local subroutine call rather than the network traffic that a client/server DB would incur. That in a way changes the asymptotics of an application: particularly, the "N+1 queries" antipattern of some client/server DB apps is a perfectly ok design strategy for SQLite. I believe Fossil may rely on this in some way.

nieve• 4 years ago

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 messages a day I'm reminded that I could have had real kill files and proper tracking of new messages. Even close to 30 years later I haven't found anything as efficient for forums & such as a good newsreader was for netnews.

kitd• 4 years ago

The most productive workplace forum I have used was based on NNTP. So much better than "improvements" like Slack and Discourse. But then I considered it was really just a shared email. Would email with shared folders not achieve the same?

stonogo• 4 years ago

The D Language forum is a web forum/NNTP client/mail archive/irc bot/rss feed. You don't have to make an account to post. A friend of mine pointed out many years ago that it was basically the peak form of multi-protocol communications. If someone could implement convenient encryption it would be magic.

Nasreddin_Hodja2• 4 years ago

and that if I wanted a web forum, I'd consider putting a web front end on an NNTP server.

If I was developing a new forum engine, I'd base it on federated activitypub protocol.

Zopieux• 4 years ago

Looks nice! But as with any 2022 project that publishes user input, please put a section in the README describing counter-abuse and moderation features, even if (especially when!) there is none. Here it seems there is an easily defeated captcha.

allanrbo• 4 years ago

Refreshingly simple. I'm so tired of JS bloat.

julianlam• 4 years ago

I haven't seen representatives from Discourse, Flarum, Vanilla, or the like chime in yet, but as the founder of NodeBB, I want to say this is just awesome!

I'm absolutely loving the fact that the HN zeitgeist has come around to embracing these no-js solutions focusing on function over form.

Every once in awhile I come across little sparks in the forum space, but they all fizzle out for one simple reason: building a forum software isn't as easy as you think it is.

For us, it took three developers a year apiece of full-time work to reach rough feature parity with our competitors, and we're still trying to innovate nearly a decade in (and add in the constant need for reducing technical debt, etc.)

For now I will say what I always say when I see new competitors in the forum space — give me a run for my money. Keep me on my toes! I appreciate the challenge, and it gives me that extra incentive to make our software the best it can be.

toomim• 4 years ago

Oh my god, this looks so sane.

cubancigar11• 4 years ago

Please accept my sincere respect. I have been trying to create a blog of sorts with no or clear degradation upon no javascript myself, but I am not much of a UI expert and have failed to make my UI good looking.

You are using flask. How is the performance? I moved away from flask to FastAPI but another one of my goal has been to create a program that can run on cheapest VMs availalble in the market, which means very low ram. I am currently trying to rewrite the server into Go and use something that can consume jinja2 templates in it.

demindiro7• 4 years ago

Performance is pretty good: CPU usage has so far not been higher than 2.5% and is usually <1% on a single core of a 3900X. Currently 192MiB of RAM is used (162MiB by systemd-journald, 4x 37MiB + 22MiB for the workers according to htop).

I'm renting a VPS in New York which costs ~€20 a month (€15 for VPS with 1 dedi 3900X core, 4GB RAM and 80GB NVMe, €3 for DDoS protection and €1.5 for up to 7 daily backups), which in hindsight is overkill.

mikespikes2• 4 years ago

Thanks for this interesting information!

mikespikes2• 4 years ago

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Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

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