Show HN: OldSkool, an old-style forum viewer for Hacker News

Hi HN,

I made this as an experiment to see if a older style (PHPBB-alike) format would enhance readability of posts on Hacker News.

To me the present style represents a discussion room in which members form nested cliques, which means that a few comments are well heard while many others are ignored. Voting exacerbates the effect, as disagreeable comments are often pushed down or hard to read (light gray text). Finally, due to the tree-style presentation, it's difficult to determine the context for a reply when there is a lot of nesting levels.

The classic forum style, in contrast, simply shows posts in chronological order, along with the reply-tree visible inline, so context is easy to determine. With no votes or light gray text, I find it significantly easier to follow the conversation; YMMV.

The present implementation is rather slow as the API isn't built for the display format I'm using. Give it a sec to load :)

I'm currently working on adding reply/submit functionality. You'll see dummy replies to this post while I get that working.

Thanks for taking a look!

I use CSS to change some things (such as comment colours; I made them all black, rather than gray). I do dislike the ordering that HN currently has, and would prefer to have chronological order. If someone has a user script to do that, then I would like to see that, and then maybe I will use it too.

What else I might like to have is support with NNTP. Then, use any NNTP client to access it. (A custom header could be used as the URL link, when there is one, I suppose.) However, to support that would need to be either official or if unofficial the mirrors will not be in agreement with each other, and if it does not store local copies, will lose some data such as message ID if the client specifies it. So, it isn't really so simple to do externally.

What I dislike about the API is it provides the text as HTML, rather than in the format it was input as. Therefore, it must be converted back to its original format from HTML. (This is probably not too difficult as far as I can tell, except that there are two different ways to make literal asterisks, and this might be a problem. Please fix this.)

First comment from OldSkool :)