Show HN: Real-time file sharing site

http://volafile.io/r/GAKbA

by chmod775 • 13 years ago

218 97 13 years ago

volafile.io

jameshsi• 13 years ago

Interesting concept for sure. What's the tech behind this?

chmod7756• 13 years ago

Hello. It's almost exclusively a nodejs + redis stack.

There are currently a little over 200 people on the page and moderating the site is taking most of my attention, I'll try to answer all questions in this thread anyways.

darkbot• 13 years ago

Build some community moderation tools and promote some trustworthy people.

justhw• 13 years ago

For those at work, there's quite a bit of stuff not tagged nsfw. Tread with care.

jsnk• 13 years ago

Yes, do not open any images

omnisci• 13 years ago

Thanks, I was worried about that:) Cool idea though, once it's a little more structured, that could be helpful.

kclay• 13 years ago

Nice concept, looks like 4chan may have gotten a hold of this one.

hex126484302• 13 years ago

Talking about 4chan, I really love how this site seems to be a mix of some kind of IRC and imageboard. It's also bringing back memories of some DC++ rooms I used to visit when it was the best way to share files.

degenerate• 13 years ago

Yeah DC++ and i2hub were both awesome. Both got my internet privileges taken away for a year by my university for internet misuse. Good times.

zufallsheld• 13 years ago

As far as I know, it originates from the /g/-board there.

elliottcarlson• 13 years ago

Or the HN community has some crossover with the 4chan one.

hippich• 13 years ago

NSFW

speedyrev• 13 years ago

I don't know that the site is NSFW, but clicking the links on the site is not advised at work.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

It's [largely?] unmoderated UGC, it's NSFW.

Da_Capo• 13 years ago

How are you handling piracy on the site? Surely that must be an issue. I see some torrents are being uploaded.

chmod7756• 13 years ago

Piracy is obviously an issue. And we (mods) will of course delete all files that might bring volafile in legal trouble.

mikegioia• 13 years ago

You did a great job with this. I got a couple 502s viewing files but it works really well so far.

pla3rhat3r• 13 years ago

Wait, a chat room AND the ability to share NSFW pics? What could go wrong!?!

gmjoe• 13 years ago

There's always something kind of magical about real-time sites -- like the Internet is a little less lonely, and there are real people out there.

Very cool!

hfantods• 13 years ago

Exactly my feeling. Couldn't really articulate it.

Skovy• 13 years ago

So basically this is a porn site... It needs moderation badly!

theorique• 13 years ago

To remove all the non-porn content?

scottydelta2• 13 years ago

music piracy is the biggest issue you will face.

scottydelta2• 13 years ago

I just saw some sick stuff there which can't be unseen. :'(

volker48• 13 years ago

Trolls... Trolls everywhere.

jayt92• 13 years ago

Very cool site.

skizm2• 13 years ago

Haha, just logged in to see this: "PaulGraham: APPLY TO YC SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY FROM THIS" and also "PaulGraham: THIS IS THE NEXT FACEBOOK".

chmod7756• 13 years ago

I'm German so I probably can't apply to YC. Plus I've just made this as a hobby/side project and don't have time to deal with trying to monetize it yet.

argumentum• 13 years ago

You can definitely apply to YC if you're from Germany, or any other country.

skizm2• 13 years ago

I am assuming this was not PG. There are much better ways to contact a site owner. Also the user kept saying "DROP THE THE". Obviously there is no "the" in the site's name.

dgouldin• 13 years ago

I'd hoped this was something like Napster built on WebRTC data channel. No such luck.

dpiers• 13 years ago

The 12-hour lifespan of content links is interesting; it prevents indexing or hot-linking content on the site. Even if the RIAA/MPAA/etc. set up bots watching the room and issuing takedowns for infringing files, the time allowed to comply with a DMCA takedown is greater than the lifespan of a file on the service.

In other words: this should be fun, until they get sued out of existence.

toomuchtodo5• 13 years ago

Feature Request: Host on infrastructure outside of the US.

EDIT: DISREGARD. It's already hosted outside the US. (Germany: https://www.ip-projects.de/)

chmod7756• 13 years ago

We (ehrm, I) are based in Germany, along with all servers.

dsrguru• 13 years ago

I know a lot of this post-PRISM fear of the US government is to be expected and is certainly popular on HN, but comments that single out the US like this really make little sense to me. The governments of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all share tech-related intel with the United States and, potentially if not presumably, have similarly intrusive methods of surveillance. China goes so far as to ban social media sites that they don't have control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and replaces them with sites that they do (renren, weibo, and youku/tudou). That, combined with general censorship of the web, is far scarier than what the NSA does, even assuming the NSA's scope is as wide as television shows make it out to be. And even in most other countries, the scope of domestic Internet surveillance is unknown, which is very different from "known to be minimal".

Edit: Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.

jjoe• 13 years ago

Problem is upstream will either charge for handling take-down requests, null route the IP, or ask that they take their business elsewhere. I can imagine this generating dozens of abuse requests a day. It doesn't matter if you auto-comply within 12 hours - upstream still has to put time figuring things out.

wehadfun• 13 years ago

Glad it dose not automatically show the images.

rebel• 13 years ago

I love this idea and I think this has the potential to be really amazing. I could see myself using it socially as well as a sort of remote office. The ability to have music autoplay (? it appears anyway, doesn't seem to be working for me right now) seems very interesting. I think you're really onto something with this. My main concern would be privacy before I started using this on any type of regular basis though. If you can solve that, or even really just make a self-hosted version, I'd be all over it.

toomuchtodo5• 13 years ago

You should probably block EXE files for the safety of your users.

fragsworth• 13 years ago

And .bat, .scr, .pif, .com? And .zip, .tar, .gz, .rar?

And then a shit load of file extensions that potentially run arbitrary code if you have the tool installed.

Seems kind of pointless.

zhemao• 13 years ago

Or they can just take the executable and change the extension. Extension-based blocking doesn't really work. However, these types of files generally have magic numbers in their headers that you could inspect to determine what they are.

Also, it'd be rather inconvenient if you couldn't upload a compressed archive to a file-sharing site.

source99• 13 years ago

It took just under 20 years for someone to re-create the core value of AOL to teenagers from the early/mid nineties.

Geee• 13 years ago

This thing will explode. Get ready to monetize or shut it down :) Easy thing you could do is rate limit transfers by default and offer higher bandwidth with a small bitcoin payment.

antocv• 13 years ago

Please dont go down this route it leaves bad taste.

Any site which segregates its users, oppreses those non-paying, poor people, isnt attractive at least in my book.

An alternative is to do like reddit, offer pay-for-services in exchange for something more, not take away functionality from those poor users to force some kind of payments.

spindritf• 13 years ago

Announcement: Because of the high traffic we are seeing right now, the radio might take a long time to load or not work at all.

Hacker News killed the radio star.

Very cool idea. With a little faster chat (there's currently quite a delay between saying something and seeing it displayed) I can see it catching on. Hang out, share files, listen to the music together.

jffry• 13 years ago

This sounds really cool, but socket.io.js is throwing "Unexpected response code: 502" when attempting to make a websockets connection.

I'll have to try again later, I suppose.

ahoy• 13 years ago

I saw this a few weeks ago, very cool project you're working on. I love the proto-web feeling it has. All the best!

dec0dedab0de• 13 years ago

Maybe some kind of AV scanning as files are uploaded.

dexen• 13 years ago

Auto-assignment of nicknames seems a particularly nifty feature -- a warm welcome for first-time users.

Overall seems a well-balanced crossover of IRC and message board. (Almost) Everything Google Wave wanted to be, but never had a chance to become.

How do I rent a private channel for company-wide use? ;-)

wanda• 13 years ago

yeah, I would also be interested in having a private channel.

bolder88• 13 years ago

There's a lot of lag for a few people in a chatroom. Looks fun apart from that though.

desouzt• 13 years ago

It never ceases to amaze me how immature people can be when unleashed with this type of product!

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

To be fair, it's a 4chan project.

devinmontgomery• 13 years ago

I feel like I reached out and touched the face of the Internet. This is very very cool.

shahar2k• 13 years ago

Is this kind of platform possible with WebRTC? (where the files are hosted on the users' computers instead of requiring your own servers?)

ingrownpsyche• 13 years ago

I assumed this was using WebRTC. Is it not?

erbbysam• 13 years ago

Yup it's possible. It doesn't appear to be here though, especially if the files have any sort of lifespan not dependant on the users browser staying open. Anyhow, I built something similar over at rtccopy.com which does use webrtc

aperture• 13 years ago

There seems to be a twitter account here for it: https://twitter.com/volafile

Also, in chat I found https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs for solutions to fixing the site. However, I cannot vouch that is an official bug report location.

Considering this issue (nfsw): https://github.com/binlain/volafile-bugs/issues/5

I find this website a little amusing, but also creative. I think it's quite exciting overall! Good luck!

PhearTheCeal• 13 years ago

That is the official bug report location.

jaggs• 13 years ago

"The room is full. Please try again later."

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

chmod7756• 13 years ago

I had to limit the room size to 300 people because my cheap 5€ VPS was hitting 100% CPU load. There are about 500 people on the page across all rooms now.

codingdave• 13 years ago

Real-time file sharing on a site that seems to have already become a real-time UI to 4chan....

Let me think about this. No, no I don't trust my virus protection enough to open anything here.

hornbaker• 13 years ago

The HN room is full. You can discover other rooms here: http://volafile.io/discover

pmelendez• 13 years ago

I find very interesting how a lot of people is sharing their resume, suddenly all the HN traffic (potential employers included) are reading random resumes.

I don't know if that would be effective at all but it is very interesting.

vxNsr2• 13 years ago

This is basically IRC with file sharing... and everyone is ignoring the filesharing part because it's full of porn. So basically you created a html5 IRC clone, very cool.

Just wondering: What are your plans for this? And Does this have any IRC-like commands?

hex126484302• 13 years ago

and everyone is ignoring the filesharing part because it's full of porn. It's much better in smaller rooms.

vxNsr2• 13 years ago

Makes sense, I could see this eclipsing the current way we share files.

Thought of a new analogy: snapchat meets IRC meets torrents

Globz• 13 years ago

Awesome project! I love the feel and the sharing mechanics!

taigeair• 13 years ago

Yeah I like it too.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

paul graham dancing with bill gates 1999.jpg

That escalated quickly.

ElongatedTowel• 13 years ago

You count how many lines in the chat one has missed, but if you come back to the tab there is no indication where you left off. Might be useful.

Raphmedia2• 13 years ago

It's very nice for what's going on right now. I mean, a big internet orgy. However, the lack of private rooms pretty much kills it for me.

Otherwise, it would have been perfect to use at work.

chmod7756• 13 years ago

There will be private rooms (hidden in the public list) and password protected rooms in the foreseeable future.

Raphmedia2• 13 years ago

I really like your app. I have been using it for a while and brought a few IRC buddies on it.

asdad• 13 years ago

Is the source for this available somewhere?

diaz• 13 years ago

Very nice and cool.

Just one thing, I like to open links in a new background tab, so I just CTRL + click or just middle click with the mouse, the first option is not working the last one is fine.

keypusher• 13 years ago

The spam right now is out of control, but it might die off in a few days. You should consider using http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/XKCD-SIGNAL mode for your chat.

gcv• 13 years ago

Keep it classy, Internet. Keep it classy.

meritt• 13 years ago

Interesting proof of concept although I personally prefer hipchat for a the "chatroom with group file sharing" benefit.

The ephemeral nature of the downloads is really interesting though. I've seen a number of sites starting to target that niche (http://dissipateapp.com/ for file sharing specifically with "self-destructing" files) but mostly aimed at just messaging (like Snapchat or Frankly).

Why risk putting your important documents on a site where it's only a matter of time before it's compromised? Most of the time once your recipient has the file it's safe to remove from the cloud.

Chromozon• 13 years ago

Might be desired behavior, but holding CRTL while clicking on a link in Firefox opens the link in a new tab, but it does not keep you on the main page. It's a bit annoying to click on a file and have to switch back to the homepage tab to get something else.

fenollp• 13 years ago

Also press MAJ then, new tab should open in background ;

Vekz• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the old school Napster. I think it could use an AV scanner on upload. Also a preview mode for images and documents and videos would be cool too.

bigd• 13 years ago

AWESOME I'm already addicted

ww520• 13 years ago

What's the bandwidth cost for this kind of app? I'm always afraid a popular rampup would incur a huge bandwidth bill for sites like this.

Fundlab• 13 years ago

Is there an upload limit? Is it possible to share a 5gb file?

novaleaf• 13 years ago

lol. clicking on those pictures... "for adults only", "NSFW"

good thing i'm the first one here this morning....

Show HN: Real-time file sharing site

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