Moot 1.0 launches with embeddable forums and commenting without iframes
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Something seems fishy here.
(Not that I don't agree with you.)
Just as I got my hopes up.
He has some data from his websites (4chan, Canvas) and he has links to other people involved in web forum technology, so a discussion forum from him could involve some interesting ideas.
It's interesting just how differently anonymity works on sites like 4chan (many people have said that anonymity + Internet = assholes) compared to the original Japanese version of 2chan, where the founder has said
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel#Anonymous_posting)
> [...] delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.
> If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
That's a funny way to treat friends.
There are some disadvantages to current iframes that Moot addresses like the lack of CSS cascading from parent page to iframe. The seamless iframe spec addresses this issue, but it's not widely adopted yet.
An example where the server may not understand the correct context occurs in this utf7 attack (http://html5sec.org/#charset). The server sanitizes the user input as utf8 where it passes. The client forces the browser to interpret the input as utf7 instead, and the string that was harmless as utf8 now becomes active js.
This is why mature platforms use dedicated windows for logging in (Facebook, Twitter, Disqus). I'd recommend you consider making this change.
Don't know about the forum aspect, but the comments design is great. I hope you can enforce whether it is linear or threaded from an admin point of view.
What confuses me a little is the part in the manifesto, where they basically claim, Moot will reduce trolling and memes and make conversation more meaningful. I think that any technical platform can be compromised, no matter how sophisticated. Sure, you can reduce trolling by voting etc., but how is technology supposed to help if the users themselves are not providing enough meaningful content?
We can reduce trolling and memes with UI design and by not allowing pictures or rich text editing. You can see it already on our new forums:
The things are properly aligned and clutter is gone.
From a cursory point of view, it seems to have more in common with Disqus than Discourse. It's embeddable, doesn't allow rich posts or markdown or our support for embedding videos, github, wikipedia, amazon, etc.
It's also closed source, although it is free and they claim they'll never insert ads.
I have no idea about their support for the other challenges we've faced such as infinite scrolling that is compatible with the back button.
I am skeptical of redis as their only data store. We use redis too in Discourse but this would demand that all forum content can fit in memory at once, and there is a chance if a server crashes you'd lose so. Not to mention querying it is much more difficult especially when filtering.
Either way, we're glad to have the competition!
As far as redis, we've put a great deal of effort into our redis infrastructure. We heavily shard and replicate data in such a way that memory constraints are not our biggest concern.
In any case, thanks for your thoughts!
As you can see, we specifically don't allow images, rich text editing or videos. We want to focus on content and the discussion. Our minimal design emphasizes this.
We also think that infinite scrolling is bad UI design. We had it on our early versions but took it away. Much clearer without - you should try too! But of course, the more we differ the less we compete with each other.
I'm happy to have many others in the forum space as it legitimizes our cause and pushes everything forward. Our main goal is to modernize forum software and so is yours, so we're fighting the same battle here.
Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :)
Two reasons nobody should take your UI design seriously: 1) "no way we're backing down", 2) infinite scrolling.
Any scoop on the problem? Is it traffic or something in the code?
Please describe what steps you did to get the error.
THANK YOU!
Please email support@moot.it if you can with details! This is the first public availability for moot so it's not too unexpected to have a few bumps.
The features you see on our site now will always be free.
Can you create an account and try to post on our sandbox forum: http://moot.it/demos/forum.html
We have quite a bit more logging there. The production system is not showing any errors.
If you could do that THANKS! If not, sorry that you are having some issues!