Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting websockers)

It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards.

I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports)

Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted.

You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users.

Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively.

I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users.

Fun times.

I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going as long as possible.

>Fun times.

It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess.

I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of: https://hubski.com/chat

Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds of it looks like your app was solid.

If you're interested, I happened to write a simple forum software in Ruby a while ago. Indexable, light use of JS, nothing too fancy but it worked.

I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.

We're working on an alternative. Curious to see if you think it might be a good fit for your use case: https://usepingpong.com

It’s really old, I don’t think it’s useful to anyone.

You may be underestimating its value. By the sounds of it, it seems like it would combine the best of both the chat worlds (Discord, Slack, etc) as well as a forum.

You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc.

This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).

Are you saying there are no real time “chat”-like things with indexable posts and support for non-JS clients?

Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone" filled with the most awful stuff, or you can have a community of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it against the not-nice people.

How did it end?

I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content.

I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage.

It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away.

I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract.

I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...

Why not start a live archive online?

Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as the person describes.

Versus, running it for a while, as they did?

Well I did pull the plug for this reason.

It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults).

People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in).

Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff.

After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it

"it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away"

That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.

Online or not, and social group must be protected from bad actors or they will drive everyone else away. As an example, long ago I knew of a group for single adults which had one creepy guy who drove away all the women, and of course their absence drove away the men. The creator of the group took the lesson, and started a new group which required permission to join; the way it worked was you would briefly talk with the founder, and as long as you didn’t seem like a creep you were in.

You should upload the backup to Archive.org

If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

> If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

Except that the CP posts were moderated away, and presumably wouldn't be part of the archive.

Given the parent's description of the site as being "hammered" by inappropriate content (not just CP); the fact that the site was real-time, so older content could easily slip under the radar; and the fact that it was shut down abruptly -- chances are that any archive of the site would probably still contain a significant amount of illegal and/or objectionable material.

Honestly, even just the shock content and (legal) pornography would probably get a hard "no" from the Archive. They really don't want to be seen as a source for adult content.

I second this. It was already offensive at the time, but now just 10 years later, much of the stuff did age really poorly.

It went 4chan levels really fast, including racism, sexism, sharing of personal information (without consent) incl those of public figures (there was one video of some person licking a dog’s... “thing”)

And it got worse and worse every day. Also note that most of it wasn’t english. It was not an international community, the site was dutch, but that didn’t stop people from joining and posting weird shit in all kinds of languages.

Ah. I didn't realize the site had that kind of content. Burn it with fire.

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