My Project: Qotr, a quote board for your friends | Hacker News Reader

My Project: Qotr, a quote board for your friends

qotr.net

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Many of us are familiar with http://bash.org, or have our own Google doc full of funny things people have said in IRC, Campfire, et. al; my friend and I put together a free service where you can create your own quote board.

Boards are public by default; you can set up a whitelist to keep things private, and set mods and admins who can administer quotes and board settings. You can also set up sub-boards, such as "x.qotr.net" and "z.y.x.qotr.net"; permissions and quotes are inherited.

It has an API built in as well; you can make requests with a token you are assigned on your account page after sign up. It's a RESTful interface, so you can get/post/put/delete quotes to boards.

It uses PHP and MongoDB, hosted on EC2. We built this mostly in a weekend, and open-sourced a PHP framework that came out of it at http://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint (although we need to, um, build documentation and examples.) We're working on rebuilding and vastly simplifying Mint as well, over the coming months.

The website looks very good in spite of the distracting ads. Good luck! Did you use a design library like bootstrap?

Thanks; we had an internal debate on wether or not to use ads, and we decided to see what happened if we included them. It is backed by bootstrap.

You've done very well to find a four-letter domain name for a 'weekend project', let alone a relevant one. My circle uses a self-hosted homegrown wiki for this sort of thing, so we don't have searching or sorting, but content is malleable, organisable and totally free-form.

A point to make about our system, is that everyone is trusted enough for us to not employ any sort of account system. We do however publically log IPs with a hash of the user-agent, so people can at least see if the same person was responsible for multiple edits. Since this sort of information can be gathered by any website, i like to think making it public gives our non-technical users a more solid understanding of how their actions online can be traced.

Thanks; we were both pretty surprised that it was available. We kind of named the site based on the domain, rather than the other way around.

I like the idea of making edits public - kind of Stack-Overflow-like in a way, so that if someone with mod access edits your post, you can see who. We could also put in an option to allow everyone mod access, more wiki-like; if you have a trusted whitelist that could access your board, only those people would be allowed to read, and therefore edit.

Cool ideas. Thanks!

Who owns the commented we post? Do they automatically become the property of Olivine Labs LLC? The ToS makes no mention of this.

I'll make this clear in the ToS. Thanks for pointing it out.

Updated; you own the content, and grant us a license to use. IANAL; I modeled it after several other sites.

Here http://qotr.net/Quotes/ the quotes draw less attention than the buttons themselves. You could make the font bigger or more attractive, I guess.

What language did you guys use in this project?

Yeah, that's a good point. We should tone down the buttons a bit; maybe use colored arrows (a la Reddit) instead of bright buttons.

We used PHP and MongoDB with our homegrown framework (https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint); we're working on solidifying the framework and getting documentation and examples together.

For those not reading the title, link is http://qotr.net

Good luck

A Lot of developers have a MOTD file in their applications, before I compiled my motd file I looked everywhere for a simple motd feed but gave up as it was all too much time and trouble and quicker to compile my own off the various text files out there. Maybe a future market but I doubt it (there again porn sites do quite well and you can get it for free)

You seriously need some sort of moderation, no-ones going to stay on a page where on the first page one of the quotes is "does this work"

We do have moderation, and you can set admins and mods on your own board, but I'm trying to refrain from using it too much. I hope that downvotes / new quotes drown out the 'does this work' kind of 'quotes'. I prefer a more open form of governance than heavily moderated, but maybe I need to prune some of the bad quotes?

Ugh, seriously? Is this what modern web application development has come to?

It's a weekend project that a friend and I put together. If you have any constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it.

It's a fun project that we built for ourselves, then opened it up to whoever else wants to use it for free. Thanks for calling it "modern web development", though; we're proud of the framework and our implementation. Even if you were being sarcastic.

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