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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS.

I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

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I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again?

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason?

Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t.

Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.

Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style.

Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”.

And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish.

Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.

I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...

It’s just the feeling! :-)

vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

Because it’s like swimming across a large lake finding yourself exhausted in the middle with little alternative to swimming back.

Now on my phone it’s relatively easy to jump to the top of the page. It’s also almost done impossible to jump to the bottom.

On a desktop I can at least mash the END key or play silly reindeer games with the scrollbar thumb.

On mobile it’s very hard to Leap or Surge or Jump.

If I’m madly fanning the page with my thumb or, worse, my fingers because I’m tired with my thumb, I pretty much just give up at that point.

I also like having non-endless scrolling because I can use the scroll bar as a gauge of how much is left of the article.

Being constantly fed is just a bad experience.

Terrible user experience. If it infinitely scrolls I can be sure some gesture on the phone will lose my spot and it will take ages to find where I was. Also they rarely play nice with the back button. There is usually a better way to present data.

For reading, do you prefer books or ancient scrolls?

Apollo (reddit client on iOS) solves this by having the same gesture undo itself -- tap at the top to scroll to the top of the reddit post, tap again to return to where you were.

I'm not saying your complaint is invalid, just that there are ways of mitigating the issue. And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

> I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

Presumably similarly to HackerNews threads, which are paginated.

Yes. Pagination can be bad if the URL indexes by 1-10, 11-20 etc. But I think HN paginates using the post ID, so that the links are permanent (?) which is a better way to do it. Basically the novel idea here is to treat the browser like a REST client.

This also means you need a predictable, deterministic algorithm, like "ORDER BY DATE DESC", but Reddit does have order by popularity, so that will not be idempotent. But now being super picky as order by popularity is pretty useful. Although I think date should be the default. And order by [what cambridge analytica-likes know about me] should be off.

HN also lets you elide branches with a click, so you're not trapped in a section you're not interested in. It's so nice opening a 400 response thread, getting 10 messages into the top comment, and clicking the hide button and watching 200 messages vanish.

Do you have a way to fold a branch once you're, as you say, 10 messages in? Or do you need to scroll back up to the parent to fold it? That's what I'm seeing and it's sub-optimal.

HackerNews threads aren't paginated, at least not for me. I just checked a post with 500 comments on it, and they all displayed in one long list.

HackerNews posts are paginated. And there isn't any interface for navigating the pages. Which is fine for HN's minimalist approach and tech-oriented audience. But it hardly seems optimal for a general audience.

> And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

It's not that hard. I saw good example of paginated threads at livejournal.com: it paginates root comments and collapses large subthreads. https://ammo1.livejournal.com/1348094.html?view=comments#com...

Yeah but how many people will discover that functionality themselves vs how much effort will you expend trying to educate the rest of your users? Pagination wins because there's nothing to learn, it's obvious where you are and how to get somewhere else.

Sounds reasonable. I am complaining about infinite scroll on the web. But inside a native app it might be better since there is more precise control of that experience. Assuming the app creator has done a good job.

The app creator has done a very good job. And is responsive if there is an issue.

Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle.

But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own.

It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.

Someone posted this on HN last month and I think it summarizes very well what people dislike the most about infinite scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617

Impossible to jump pages, know how much there is, often breaks native scrolling in awkward ways without recourse.

It often breaks the builtin Browser-Search.

Which is often followed by attempts to replace browser native Find in Page with a custom implementation that doesn't work as well.

And you love it, so much? It's probably the stupidest thing ever invented as far as UX goes.

It is possible the gp post just feels neutral about it. There are a whole range of emotions between love and hate.

I do feel neutral/indifferent about it. I was just wondering why I see so much negative sentiment towards it.

I feel vaguely-neutral/negative toward it. It plays somewhat annoyingly with things like bookmarking (mitigated slightly by the fact that infinite scrolls are usually generated content anyway so bookmarking them is probably meaningless) and are trying to tempt the user into endless scrolling (but I guess it is our responsibility to resist the temptation there).

It makes it impossible to get to the footer.

And impossible to link to anything behind the scroll interaction.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh

EDITED: *conversations

I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.

> Old Reddit

Important distinction.

New Reddit also fell prey to bad development practices and is without exaggeration unusable for me. It often "crashes" and the whole page goes dark-grey on my browser, and this has been happening for at least a year. After reloading I can't see all messages without navigating away, and middle click messes with the scrolling. At this point I will assume they either don't care or are fucking with me.

Which browser do you use?

Firefox mostly, but that also happens with Safari in my other PC.

I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.

The way Usenet clients and traditional email clients work is that unread messages are marked as such (usually by use of bold typeface), and you have keyboard shortcuts to navigate from one message to the next, or to jump to the next unread message.

For example, the Tab key jumps to the next unread message, Space/Backspace scroll up/down within a message, and the Up/Down arrow keys jump to the previous/next message (regardless if unread or not). A message is marked as read automatically when you navigate to it (it gains focus). There’s also a keyboard shortcut to mark a read message as unread again if you w.

The keyboard navigation means that only one message has focus any point in time. You have a threaded view of all messages, where the unread ones are highlighted (e.g. by bold typeface). Then you can decide which ones to navigate to. Usually you just use Tab and Space to jump/scroll through the unread messages. It’s incredibly efficient to use.

I am the developer of HACK, an iOS, android, MacOS client app which provides push notifications for HN when someone replies to your comment or post.

Notifications and sorting for new like reddit has.

that only really works for responses to your comments and top level comment chains though.

Technically, you should be able to subscribe to any comment’s descendants. But that is not implemented anywhere I know, sadly.

I too miss the good old days where the information you wanted was buried somewhere in a 100 page phpBB thread and you had to manually search through it 1 page at a time, with each one-line comment taking up half the page with avatars and signatures.

Good times. Sad that things have moved on to systems that don't suck quite so much but that's progress for you.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.

> find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

This is not new, it just isn't applied to web based forums as much as I (someone who likes threaded discussions like that) would like. For small discussions it make little difference, for large branching threads it can help greatly when you don't care to follow all the sub-threads. It was not uncommon in Usenet clients back in the day. Of course it needs to be coupled with good UI for collapsing branches and otherwise navigating the tree, and perhaps a chronological view option for issue who prefer that (or a tree-view with posts spaced by arrival order for the best of both of you do it right - I had a reader that did that but can't currently remember it's name).

I find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.

it works if you want to read a thread exactly once and then never come back to it. if it's an ongoing discussion that you want to visit even just two times, you'll just end up reading all the same comments again and struggle to find anything new

I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability.

Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem.

Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond.

Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)

My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other.

But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion.

Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now.

[1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952

vBulletin 3.x/4.x and IPB 2.x/3.x had threaded view as an option alongside flat.

Forum software of old actually gave users the power to choose the interface they want. We've really gone backwards with software interfaces.

Also, themes. These days all we get are "Dark Mode" and "Light Mode". Boring.

Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.

It looks like a regular flat forum with a thread display just bolted on top of the page where clicking a post in the thread just dumps you in the middle of a flat discussion

What are they using?

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Thank you. I just found it now on my own on desktop via their "About this forum" footer link, wasn't obvious to me when I quickly glanced at it on mobile earlier.

For what it's worth, phpBB still sortof supports having javascript disabled [1] but it is nowhere near as lightweight as the example here created by demindiro.

I also commend demindiro on not requiring JS. It is refreshing to see simple yet useful applications.

[1] - https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2106245

I loved PunBB. 18 years ago at my first IT job I actually stole PunBBs design to make the control panel for our web hosting company. Nobody knew because even then punbb was kinda esoteric.

I do still wonder why the fast and responsive software can't invest a little bit into design in order to not look like complete shit.

Sure something like phpBB is light, but the UX is also barely usable. Give me something like Reddit or Discourse over that any day. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

Hackernews on the other hand manages to lack both (in some speculations intentionally), with neither usable design nor speed.

There is a considerable cultural overlap between "people who think no-JS, fast and responsive software is cool" and "people who think the design of Reddit or Discourse is really awful". (Man, especially Reddit, I swear the day they retire old.reddit.com will be the day I stop using it). They probably are investing a little bit into design, just not the one you like.

FOSS tends to treat aesthetics like developers complain executives treat software quality: This doesn't help me. Why does it matter? Why should I care? I see no difference.

Improving either is an uphill battle when decision makers don't value the work, at best, or at worst are committed to resistance. And you don't even get paid.

Yep often they don't see aesthetics/usability as a feature, and sometimes even have a grudge against it.

For example, Blender pre-v2.8, many many flamewars belittling people who wanted something usable, akin to calling them shallow/superficial Untermensch who "don't understand" Blender's supposedly genius but strange design choices at that time.

I suppose that's why most aren't capable of making a product and are relegated to being an employee or unpaid open source employee.

I also miss the days of good ole server-side rendered applications. I'm not sure the author's history or work experience, but, if I built something like this, I'd likely find it extremely cathartic compared to most tech stacks nowadays. :-)

For that era, FluxBB/PunBB weren't even that great. I think phpBB/vBulletin took the cake (as was evident by the number of forums run by the said software), and of course, IPB was also nice but came with a steep price by comparison.

PHPBB

The point of no-js is mainly to avoid client-side tracking, right?

Can't you do a lot of that with CSS?

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