My weekend hack postmortem: Iterating

I love the idea of realtime anonymous forums by accident some months ago. I was writing an updated library for Friendfeed's API and decided to write a client for testing, but while rushing through I had left out identifying information from the client.

It was one of the most interesting experiences I've had online; I noticed that I was liking/not-liking things specific people would say, that I normally wouldn't. I had somehow managed to surpass the internal biases I had built up about specific people. Obviously doesn't answer the question of how I'd change if I was acting anonymously, since everyone else could identify me. But for me looking out and interacting largely anonymously with people I already knew was profound.

Personally, I find the color's annoying and cluttered, but it is a decent idea to add some common identity inside a thread. I like the idea in general, and would love to see more things like it.

You're writing was great. I laughed several times during the "Then all hell broke loose" section.

I don't know if you were influenced by it, but anonymous text boards are somewhat common on the Japanese internet, and there are a small number of English (and Spanish and German) language derivatives. Unfortunately, even though there are several pieces of text board software, they're all very similar. Seeing something like this which is highly divergent is quite a treat.

Are threads ordered by most recent post or something more complicated?

If you hash the ip and then use that for colouring the hash function is likely to be surjective (rather than bijective) but perhaps you could still work back to "it was probably one of these x (255?) ips"? If you then open source the code too, do you make it more susceptible to working back to the original ip? Perhaps you'd need some form of salt too?

Hey there mate. I'm the one who was linking to the Underscore.js annotated escape function:

http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.h...

If you use something like this when displaying messages, it should not allow any XSS.

I wonder what the cultural impact would be if realtime anonymous forums forced everyone to use proper spelling/grammar.

Please, please do not use ragefaces while writing. In addition to being an utterly exhausted internet meme, they take something out of the prose- it would be more compelling, better flowing writing if you were to try and describe your own feelings. I should add that, as prosody said, imageboard discussions are working anonymous communication models. Take 2channel, with the slogan 「ハッキング」から「今晩のおかず」まで (From "hacking" to "side dishes for tonight's dinner"): it generates revenue of around 100 million yen per year; or perhaps 4chan, which has either scarred the internet, or broadened it depending on your viewpoint, having once (I believe) produced those images you used in your post. I'd be really interested to see how you use similar projects to inspire yours, and as I've tried to show, innovation in this area could be influential or lucrative.

instead of the color (which personally I like), you could use numbers, so the first person who replies is #1, next is #2, and they re-use that number for the extent of that thread. That way if you're having a discussion with someone, you know it's still them

If you guys have any feedback on the site or my writing, I'd love to hear!