Swift Forums | Hacker News Reader

Swift Forums

forums.swift.org

43 pointsdamuellen22 comments

The old title was "Official Swift forums switch to Discourse," or something along those lines. The current title ("Swift Forums") tells you nothing.

Aside: I detest Discourse. It is an abomination of good ideas mated to horrible UX by developers and designers too caught up in drinking their own koolaid to understand that most people do _not_ live in Discourse and expect the website to act the same way every other website does. Hijacking `ctrl+f` in a webpage should reserve a special spot in hell for the person that decided it was a good idea [0].

[0]: https://meta.discourse.org/t/options-to-disable-hijack-of-cm...

meta: I noticed titles getting changed to something nonsensical more and more often on Hacker News. The current title is absolutely ridiculous, as it provides no value.

I know that the title is supposed to match the submission, but there are cases where a custom title makes much more sense, and provides a lot more value to the community.

It is what it is, alas, though a side effect is I check HN more often as titles often get less useful as time wears on so it's good to see them when they could catch my interest.

In this case, a link to the announcement post[1] would have been a better submission, and the title of that post is "Welcome to the Swift Forums". It's not perfect, but that, combines with the first sentence or two from the post gives a pretty clear indication of why someone might consider it noteworthy (it's a new forum), although others I'm sure would not.

1: https://forums.swift.org/t/welcome-to-the-swift-forums/8

> Hijacking `ctrl+f` in a webpage should reserve a special spot in hell for the person that decided it was a good idea

While I agree in general, and likely in this case, I think a distinction can be made based on whether it's more of a webpage, or a webapplication. ctrl-f finding within Google Sheets focuments and applying a background color to matched cells is not something I would want to give up, but that's about as far along the spectrum to application as you can get, so it's fairly cut and dry.

Ok what do you like then? PHPBB (or similar)? A mailing list? A FB group? BBS?

Yes. Or a nice slack clone.

Or discord.

Create a subreddit. Done.

Reddit automatically locks old posts doesn't it? While necro bumps in forum threads can always be a problem, it isn't inherently one.

> Hijacking `ctrl+f` in a webpage should reserve a special spot in hell for the person that decided it was a good idea

Yes that is a terrible idea.

Also since I experienced nested comments on HN and Reddit I find the old forum format quite a step backwards.

I still very much prefer forums, personally, particularly because the threads are not directly popularity ranked, and each thread is self-contained.

HN is impossible to read when a discussion gets large.

> HN is impossible to read when a discussion gets large.

True, but HN has put zero effort in having a better reading experience.

> Hijacking `ctrl+f` in a webpage should reserve a special spot in hell for the person that decided it was a good idea

But they do it for a good reason. IIRC Discourse does not load all the contents initially so your conventional Ctrl+F won't work correctly. Mind you, I also hate the hijack, but in this case I decided to bear with the unfortunate reality.

That seems like premature optimization, to me. For example, on the meta page linked above, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, it downloads two more JSON documents totaling 55 KB, for all the comments. The page itself is 3.6 MB.

By lazy-loading the rest of the comments, it makes standard browser features like searching and scrolling not work right, yet the bandwidth savings of the initial page load is <2%. You'd have to have a lot of comments on a single page before the cost of simply downloading them all became significant.

Discourse is a TERRIBLE forum system.

Of course, since Swift is a TERRIBLE language, its appropriate they are using it.

Are they written in Swift? If so where do I get the source code?

Looks like discourse [0] to me which is an open source ruby forum software

0: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Damn, I was hoping they dog-fooded some server-side swift. I was just interested in seeing a larger server-side swift project not the actual forums themselves. Thank you for the link, though.

That's still somewhat far from production.

Forums are such a massive undertaking that these days I consider it irresponsible to roll your own unless you are building a seriously novel integration.

Building a large exploratory project in Swift and having a robust place to have technical conversations should be two different projects.

What's the advantage of this forum over Stack Overflow?

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