Ask HN: real time forum software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: real time forum software?

10 pointsSkywing20 comments

Do any real-time forum platforms exist? Forums where threads and posts appear in real time? If not, would there be an audience for such software? What kind of things would have to be avoided for this type of forum to prosper?

What do you think?

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Forums aren't a software problem -they are inherently a sociological issue: community building & forming, spam filtering, navigating the political intentions, etc. If there's a single conclusion of Google Wave, it's that being "realtime" makes no guarantees for quality, and signal/noise; but makes management of such extremely more harder.

Right now, if you're responding to something on most forums (Stack Overflow excepted?), you can't see other responses which have come in while you're typing (not on the same page, anyway). I think a few years from now this will seem like the horribly broken behavior that it is. I wish you well.

I've used BB/forums which indicated new posts that came in during the time taken to compose a post. 98% of the time, it was just in the way.

would there be an audience for such software?

I believe it will be hard to get audience from most existing forums, as I see most phpbb, invision, etc. aren't rushing to move f.ex. to vanilla. Most of this software is outdated and bloated, yet they have a huge ecosystem (extensions, tutorials) and userbase used to their functionality. Such product should at least provide an easy convertion schema and default themes similar to existing competition's defaults. Still it would take very long until it gained a reasonable market share IMO. If you're looking just for new market, it could succeed.

I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)

"I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)"

Agreed. :P

I don't see why people couldn't theme a forum like this, too. Perhaps also some sort of data migration tool.

Forums just kind of need a revamping!

> Forums just kind of need a revamping!

That's absolutely true, I was happy after punbb appeared and later vanilla, but I know how hard it's to make even simple updates when you have a big community. I help run a 7yr old huge automotive forum and even a phpbb2->3 upgrade caused riots, I have no idea what happens when someone would switch a huge community from bb or invision to an exotic platform :)

Perhaps we can find out.

"Challenge accepted"? :)

If i was to reinvent the forum, besides RT I'd include/change such features by default:

- simple wysiwyg B, I, U, Quote - stop all this bbcode nonsense

- js oembed or similar (automatic embedding images, videos, etc. from links)

- scaling too big images

- easy partial quoting

- marking posts/threads as favorite/follow

- openid/fb

- mobile version (what currently tapatalk does)

probably some more I can't remember right now.

There's a guy making a real-time fantasy football forum called SleeperBot: http://www.sleeperbot.com/. It's pretty cool. The success of one would probably depend on what it's being used for. The SleeperBot forums are great when football games are running. You would probably need some sort of reason to have a 'live' forum instead of a standard one.

I think it's been around for a couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC

I'm aware of IRC. I've hosted my own IRC server since 1999. But, I wasn't asking about IRC. Although, IRC is my inspiration for this question. I'm talking about a forum, accessible from the web obviously.

I assume you mean something like the front page of hacker news but where you could watch the positions/scores change and old items fade out as new ones take their place? I think that would be pretty slick. However I can imagine people wanting a "pause" button in case they don't appreciate the idea of things they were planning on clicking on disappearing. Were you planning on implementing this?

I'm just brainstorming for something fun to work on, at the moment.

I haven't really thought out all of the different in's and out's of it all, but I think the issue you bring up would be easily overcome. It's more of a presentation issue than something going on in the back end, I think.

Check out http://www.boonex.com, they have a pretty much real time forum.

Yep: http://pixplz.com/

Yes, I run one at imeveryone.com. Click on the 'Live' section.

Friendfeed.

Have you looked at http://www.ninjapost.com/ ?

Upvoted. Mike (one of the founders) is a great guy and very helpful. I currently run ninjapost at my startup (details in profile if you want to check ninjapost out).

Thanks, rahulchaudhary!

Skywing, I am the founder of Ninja Post. Ping me with any questions - mike@ninjapost.com or try the demo forum: http://forum.ninjapost.com

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