I love this. I love the deliciously clean design, the immediate type-and-post functionality (reminiscent of IRC), the loose feel and structure of the forum that makes it a wonderful base for customisation in any aspect. I wish this were in Ruby/Rails; then I'd set it up on my site. It's precisely the sort of forum I've been looking to implement, especially the two-column format and the IRC-style text entry box.
(I wonder how I could get it to interface with a Rails app? Would there be problems just connecting it to the app's database, to get/store user accounts and stats, for example?)
UX nitpick - the site disables my Mac trackpad "swipe to navigate back" feature. Your site picks up the lateral scroll as a vertical scroll. Frustrating for trackpad lovers like me.
Magnificent. Simply wonderful. This feels like a prototype for the future of forums. It's got its little UI flaws here and there but I understand why and almost all of them can be fixed easily. Very nice work. So much potential.
- There's no reason to have the scroll bar of the thread list on the left. Hiding it unless you hover directly over it is also not a good idea. It should appear when the mouse hovers anywhere over the entire thread list.
- I strongly hate non-browser-native scrolling (scroll by javascript in an effort to style the scroll bar using css and javascript). It never feels right, or fluid. There IS a way to hide the scrollbars until the mouse hovers over the element that requires scrolling. Example: http://www.repcmods.com (abandoned prototype) (hover over the horizontal galleries) It's all done using css :hover and no javascript. The element with the scrollbar is set to overflow:hidden and on :hover it's set to overflow-y:auto; It may or may not work for you. Fix everything else first before coming back to this one.
- It's missing some white space toward the bottom making it feel really cluttered down there. Give the #left_panel and #mid_panel elements a padding-top:12px; and give .xpadbox a margin of margin:0 24px 5px;
- Also give the element #mid a padding-top:9px; so its lined up correctly. You'll have to also move up the links on in the top right of the mid panel to match as well.
- When posting a reply, the "preview" and "post" links should really be buttons not just text and they should be on the left and the text "sign up to bump, Online: 1002 users, etc..." should be on the right.
- When I open up the setting tab in the threads list it needs to stay red so the user knows they need to click it again to close the settings.
- Get rid of the dashed border bottom between threads and posts. It's too visually intrusive. Change it from dashed to dotted, instead.
- Hiding controls under the whole "to top/toggle functions" bar is completely unnecessary. As a young designer I used to hide a lot of elements thinking it would look nice and minimal and clean. Later on I find out it's one of the worst things you can do to your users. Your design is already minimal, it's already clean, don't over do it. Just keep the elements there, don't hide them.
There's a lot of confusing UI here but that's the end of my free consultation.
I don't want to be misconstrued a "bad HN commenter", so I'll say first of all, technically amazing. Also, UX is consistent and aesthetically pleasing (though admittedly incomplete; lots of actions are unexplained... e.g. what's the difference between Focus and Shift).
Technical and design accolades aside, IMHO I would not call this an improvement on existing discussion forums. In Part 4 of his post "Building a Better Online Community", he implies that a major problem is the signal to noise ratio. This web app has not solved that problem.
The extremely low barrier to participation, while inline with privacy ethics and democratic ethics, unfortunately removes important incentives to creating quality content. It is however, successful at enhancing anonymity and removing the (burdensome?) requirement of identifying oneself.
Let's take a step back and re-assess what we're looking at. It's not an improved discussion forum, it's an improved chatroom app, plain and simple. And for that, I credit it with certain innovation.
I agree that it is more chat than forum, especially because of the limited (that is, non-existent) support for threaded conversations. (The only thing I could find was a hash-number style referral shortcut).
Personally, I also disagree with removing timestamps. Although HK (presumably the author) is correct in that people can tend to ignore 2-year-old posts, this is an entirely n00b tendency, as old-hands know that there is gold in older content. That said, old-hands can very quickly filter for relevance when hunting for timely news. Removing timestamps removes that facility.
The issue with Wave for me was that it killed my computer (and I don't have a light computer) and this does the same. OP his app is so nice and light...
Yeah, it was cutting edge back in the day, but Wave is kinda oldschool tech now, being easier and faster to build with the latest RTW frameworks out there now. (mostly built on JS).
I really would love it, especially if they add export mechanisms so I won't lose my data if they ever decide to die. Burned once already, unfortunately.
OOOooo eeeeee
rizzoma alive and I love it/
I use it in all sides of my life
job
vacation
discussion
planing
I don`t use google docs more
I trust them & I belive them
This is great, I love the feel of this and the value it creates (which I'd describe as "live structured conversations").
Here's some suggestions, keep in mind these are essentially my personal opinions:
-Try putting some thought into making the functionality a little more intuitive, by this I mean to try and not necessitate having to hover too much to discover functionality. As a designer I know how difficult this is to do without spoiling aesthetics, so good luck (but I think you need to do this).
-Host this as a SaaS and make money, I image businesses would love to use this as a way to gather user feedback and talk to users.
-Categories would be nice. Right now it's just one "board" (in the traditional "online forum" sense where the set hierarchy is forum>board>thread>post). I'd find it cool if I could say visit a "sports" category, or a "Tech" category, and especially a "Hacker news" one. Think subreddits.
-The "navigation" is a little unintuitive, on the left column where it says "Threads", "Lists", "Users". When in threads mode, the other modes are listed underneath it, suggesting that they form a child relationship to Threads, whereas they're really siblings.
-I'd dispense with the little arrows under "Home" on the left column, and move the refresh button onto the same line as the Create and Home links/buttons. It doesn't really add anything. Up and down could be implemented using infinite scrolling and would be more intuitive. Left and right could be replaced by making aggregating all the different views ("My threads", "Users", "Replies", etc.) into a flyout or dropdown list, accessible by hovering the currently active mode title. This would also mean you could dispense with the 3 bottons on the bottom left next to the settings button.
-Speaking of that settings button, it doesn't have much to do with searching, instead I'd move it closer to the "user button", which you don't really have but will definitely need. Opening the user pane on the right, and then clicking the username to reveal "log out", etc. isn't easy to find.
-You probably don't need all the corner hovers, they don't really do anything useful IMHO.
-Fluid layout so it works well on mobile devices
-The reading mode is cool but you probably don't need it everywhere.
Good luck, I love the idea. Hope this goes somewhere.
It's a very nice design, but I feel removing dates is a mistake. It may be that older topics lose their value as time goes on, however that's a problem that can be fixed on the community level (by encouraging people to bump old threads, instead of discouraging it -- which is a learned behavior.) I feel like you gain very little in reality by removing dates, and you otherwise lose some very valuable or interesting info.
Scrolling is broken (and slow) on an iPad, it's apparently using some javascript scrolling lib that could be replaced with -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
Spent a little bit of time playing on this and really really impressed.
I've written a progressive enhanced forum (for mobile) and think there's a lot of room for some re-thought ways how forums could work.
But!
I did find navigating around PIvory a little hard work. I definitely had to think and discover. A lot of menu options aren't visible until you click in certain areas. That's great from a clean-design point of view, but frustrating for a new user.
I love the grey scheme, with the only colour being when you hover over icons. That said, hi-lighting your posts (and leaving your image always in colour) would be nice.
Cool we definitely has a problem with: "A lot of menu options aren't visible until you click in certain areas". I hope new version of interface will solve it.
Hah, it's funny (Baader-Meinhof style) that I'm suddenly running into pivory.com here on Hacker News - my first introduction to it was a few hours earlier today as part of a little Bitcoin extortion scheme: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/5p1G9CZP...
It's great. I love the math formulas and how you can right click to get them in different formats and change display settings. On further examination I see that this is a function of MathJax, but great job integrating it into your application.
Any tactics for blocking repeat trouble makers? You mentioned blocking by IP in your docs.
I've run a forum (1,100 posts/month) for about eight years which also allows anonymous posting as well as accounts/avatars/etc. Users blocked by IP usually reconnect with their ISP to get a new IP and run amok anew. I also have blacklisted words and phrases which can stop some problems, but not all. I end up blocking IP classes from anonymous posting to eliminate troublesome regions.
Any plans/thoughts beyond that?
(Found your forum concept initially confusing, but I greatly admire your effort and the thought that's gone into it. I think you've created something intriguing!)
Probably the best method is to give more power to your users and let them be MODs - probably vote-to-exile? Yes, it could be abused just like the case of Socrates.
But it's definitely better than blocking IP class which hurts innocent users and useless against trolls under proxy.
I currently have two classes of moderator - one with edit/delete access, and a lower one with the power to hide a post in a "Sin Bin" until a higher-level moderator can judge it.
But with anonymous accounts, I need to provide greater incentive for people to sign in - karma, etc.
The only real problem with this website is the navigation. I usually just get very lost on which parts of the site I am on because there is very little of indication of such info.
Thank you! The scrolling codes are messy and slow at the moment. I'll rebuild them using vanilla JS. You guys are the reason I can keep working on this.
I'm having problems with scrolling, too, but I'm not sure if it's a problem with the code being slow, or that we simply don't know how to use it.
The front page says "Click page borders and user icons for functions - feel free to experiment", but I think you need some documentation for people like me who aren't smart enough to figure out what they do. I see different colored rectangles and my cursor turns into a resize-top-border icon (??) and clicking things makes other things jump around or disappear but I can't tell where I am or what I'm doing.
A 2-minute tutorial could make the difference between "I'm confused, so I'm leaving" and "this is pretty neat". Of course, it'd be even better if it used controls that I already know how to use, so I didn't need to take a 2-minute tutorial to learn to use scrollbars again. :-)
Please use the native scrolling. It was completely unusable on a non-Safari browser on my iPad 2 (even vanilla Safari was so sluggish as to reduce any desire to use it). It looked interesting (and the comments here indicate it is), but the scrolling was so bad, I couldn't check it out.
I really hesitated to pint this out, because I hate negative comments when people throw there stuff out here, but this one is just too critical to your potential success.
Wow I'm speechless, this is wonderful. Going through the code, I see the widest spectrum of issues I hate about PHP in just these few files, yet the result is absolutely fascinating.
This a testament as to how the tool does not really matter in good hands.
Well it does support nested comments... They are just automatically folded so the appearance is cleaner. Try "#xxxx" (and click it). You can find the post id by clicking the user icon.
You can even do self-reference and build an infinite stair.
The idea behind threaded comments is they're a separate thread so to have them "folded in" is counter intuitive. It's already evident that this sort of "threading" is a problem, if you look you can see users referring to each other by name which doesn't associate the reply with the parent, which makes the conversation hard to follow. Imagine this with 10,000 replies...
If you don't properly thread the comments then you will very much cripple the way a conversation can evolve, I run one of the largest forums and if there's one thing that absolutely sucks it's a lack of proper threading, it seriously restricts how long a topic can survive and how useful it can be.
Is there any setup that can handle 10,000 replies well? I've always thought of it as an unsolved problem. Even with threading like HN, you have "more" and I almost never click it. I think /. used to have similar paging. Reddit?
The idea further down this chain of branching off sub-conversations has some merit IMO.
Ah I got you. I have considered this multiple times, but a flat system still appears better for me. Yes, it is a very important issue and I will try to come up with a better solution, probably hybrid.
Something I like is the idea of "forking" topics, conversations evolve and if a new comment thread becomes over a few replies there's generally a good chance it has become its own conversation which can then involve into another conversation etc etc etc.
If I was trying to keep the system as "flat" as possible I would consider deciding on an arbitrary cut off point (total replies, or total "levels" of replies) that automatically forks a thread into a new topic and then in the original topic would display in a similar style to a comment but with "this comment has generated a new topic, 2 replies... load preview / go to topic")
not sure if that's explained well enough, but I think that would solve the problem.
That's a great idea. Maybe it needs good auto-categorization to implement well, but another idea is to not bother with the thresholds at all -- every comment can potentially spawn off a new wave of replies, so why not just fork into separate threads immediately? The top level view gives you the flat view of the top level thread, and by diving in through the replies you can keep flat views of each sub-conversation. If every comment is treated the same, then it truly doesn't matter how old the comment you're replying to is because you could be sparking an entirely new discussion.
I couldn't find any nested comments, but I think it would be good to not flatten them so that you can actually see the conversation directly, like we're doing now
Your browser does not have window.WebSocket object :-(
Try the lastest version of Chrome or Firefox or Safari.
I know that I have to update, but realize that not everyone has the latest/greatest stuff out there. Also, if I visit your page without JS it doesnt show anything (at all).
There is a simple solution:
Step 1) Upgrade your browser.
Step 2) Enable JavaScript.
You can't strip down your browsers functionality and expect the web to conform to it.
Thats like saying this website won't load on my potato! EVIL EVIL potato haters!
As an engineer focusing on web software I also see these comments a lot. I also know how it drives people (buying customers) away from websites. Yet it is rather surprising how people like you make such comments. "Upgrade your software, you fool!" seems to be the norm. But, how much does it cost to add a few lines of code like the following:
<noscript>Please enable javascript. If you have any questions how to do so, please click on this <a href="#">link.</a></noscript>
In fact, I'll license that code right there under the GNU WTFPL license, so web devs like you can use it to their advantage.
In terms of browsers, allow me to ask you some questions. Do you know which is the second most used browser in the USA? Firefox. Which version? Not the latest. People are always at least one or two updates behind. Not making a website available to a majority is just bad business sense.
I'm sorry. I couldn't read your comment. My hammer and chisel can't render that text properly. Not everyone has a computer you know! Please provide proper support.
I was looking at the git repo and I couldn't seem to figure out how it was doing all the asyc connections. I looked at his source code and he is using websockets which I don't believe is in the git repo. Correct me if im wrong.
I would like to evaluate the site, but it is nearly impossible to view from my phone (iphone, safari). If I zoom in on an area, the page resizes itself and remains unreadable.
The founder himself stayed at my place using airbnb this summer. I'm a YC alum. He has one of the most interesting founding stories I've ever heard. He is a Siberian-Kazakhstani hacking competition winner who knows Judo and runs a series of small businesses in Russia. Bars that partake in sportsbetting-all Legal. He designed the software as a way to manage his businesses with his founders and grew it into something more.
That unjustified blanket statement and the tone of your comment just rub me the wrong way.
Who cares how amazingly, mind-blowingly awesome your buddy the founder of Rizzoma is? This thread is about another project, and it's not based on Wave. This is hardly the place where you should walz in and shill for something else without so much as a word about Pivory, let alone some constructive criticism of any kind.
I wish you the best in building your technology. I will say you've done some pretty cool stuff in the area of UX with the ability to change the fonts and appearance on the fly. I meant no offense.
Hi kumarski, your comment is strange. I don't know Udo in any way.
Pivory is a one-man project. I built all the codes and designs by myself (and owe many thanks to the users who were so nice and provided many useful comments - I posted it to /r/programming before this).
I have been coding for 20 years, so it's not that unthinkable. Sometimes the one-man way can be the fastest way. No time wasted in communications. Refactoring is always straightforward.
Rizzoma is 100 times more complicated and I must say: nice work! It covers a completely different market. I can see all the efforts behind it.
WTF, I never said I had anything to do with the project! I was merely making a point about being more supportive towards a Show HN project instead of just linking to a competitor and stating "this is better and the guy running it is awesome".
How can anyone read my comment and infer it's my project? Was my wording really that misleading?!?
Rizzoma allows communication within a certain context permitting a chat to instantly become a document where topics of a discussion organized into branches of mind-map diagram and minor details are collapsed to avoid distraction.
Because we all know a person who's said to us at one point or another "I wish I had a way to have a chat instantly become a document where topics of discussion are organized into branches of a mind-map diagram."
Actually I think that is what a lot of systems are moving towards... a real-time outliner/wiki. I use WorkFlowy with others to manage releases and other information and with just a couple multi-user oriented feature it would match your description. Trello is in this direction as well. Google Wave just felt toooo real-time and free-form.
How is it better? Rizzoma (wave) is so incredibly complicated I feel very overwhelmed when I visit the site. It's like stepping into a fighter jet cockpit.
I agree.. I've just tried it. It took forever to load and when it was loaded, I felt in an ugly wysiwyg editor with buttons and editable fields everywhere. I was troubled and had no idea where to look or click.
I feel that I really didn't give rizzoma a fair tryout but then if the first impression is overwhelming and scary, it's hard to move forward.
I'd suggest cutting all the crap and introduce more complex features over time.. or when it's needed.
Same experience here. I think compared to Ops site, Rizzoma is over-engineered out of the wazoo. Once you start adding features for everyone, their grandma and their dog, things are bound to get complicated. The Ops site is such a simple and a breath of fresh air.
Actually you right. Rizzoma have too complicated UX. In couple weeks we are going to release new version of our interface and I hope it will much easier in user perception
Completely different site with completely different philosophy. I prefer pivory.
For starters I wouldn't log in to a site like this using neither a Facebook account (which I have but it's full of bogus data) or a Google+ account (which I only have because they created it for me, which is when I deleted the little true info about me there).
Browser "back" should work in the same way. (every topic has own link). Our back button has different feature it play your last changes back (like back button in ms word). May be we should change the icon?
(I wonder how I could get it to interface with a Rails app? Would there be problems just connecting it to the app's database, to get/store user accounts and stats, for example?)
Here's the github repo containing the open-source fork of it: https://github.com/cheshirecats/CuriousWall
Thanks cheshirecat, you've done a great thing here.