8 days. 8,000 forums | Hacker News Reader

8 days. 8,000 forums

moot.it

63 pointstipiirai70 comments

I don't believe in forums as a SaaS.

Wordpress growth, in a sense, it is because it is open source. You can have your own version, and also, if you prefer, they can host your blog.

A forums is a different kind of service, takes a lot of time and effort to build a community, and if this guys dissapear in 2 or 3 months, years, etc, it is a big loss.

I prefer the path that Discourse is taking. It's software is open source & they are experts in hosting it. Like wordpress. So, if my community finally is growing, I can think on host everything by myself.

Also, I love redis, I use it a lot, but don't understand why it is a key driver to explain the product proposition.

I _do_ believe in forums as a SaaS.

Yes, there are risks, as you pointed out. There are also benefits.

The forum service provider rolls out updates

The forum service provider applies security patches

The forum service provider keeps the service running 24 hours, and gets woken up in the middle of the night to fix unexpected crashes, not me.

I try to outsource anything I can. And forums is one of them.

I run some very large forums, and the reason I'm now making a forum PaaS/SaaS play is precisely because of the above.

Just Google for "Powered by vBulletin 3.8" to see how many hundred thousands of forums are running old unpatched versions of forum software.

Most people who run forums are into the topic of the forum, not becoming a sysadmin.

We just blogged something about infrastructure where Redis plays a key role. It has nothing to do with our product proposition. Expect to see various topics about design and technology.

Hello, Wordpress is a blog engine, not a forum.

Very impressive.

We have a startup ( http://microco.sm/ ) in this very space (hosted forums) and will be launching our alpha in the next two weeks. Our design rushes are pretty close to this (though we haven't updated the linked site in ages it feels) and we love that others are innovating in this space and feel that they've also spotted and validated a need for simpler, more engaging forums.

I really like the look of this, one of the much stronger offerings to have emerged in this space.

Will be good to see how we all do in a year or so, and which we way pivot and the changes in our respective business models.

Right now this looks like more of a Disqus rival than anything, but I'm sure they will do well with things like forums for really small communities such as housing associations and knitting groups, etc.

Thank you! Welcome on board!

It is really snappy and nice, however I still don't understand why there isn't nested threads. It's such a pain trying to navigate around trying to figure out what is in reply to what.

Moot has a concept of "paths" which allow you to setup unlimited discussion hierarchies. All parent paths contain all the moots from the children.

We're putting together more docs to help cover these concepts soon!

Single thread (which we call a moot) doesn't support threading. If you try to browse bigger threads here in HN or in Reddit you'll soon realize that you'll get lost. Especially when you come back to the site it's impossible to know what has changed. We think discussions should be chronological.

Later we're adding support for replying to replies (one level only) and a way to branch from the main topic.

> If you try to browse bigger threads here in HN or in Reddit you'll soon realize that you'll get lost.

That never happens to me, especially on reddit, where threads are collapsible. How do you end up lost?

> Especially when you come back to the site it's impossible to know what has changed.

No it's not. There's a reddit gold feature for that.

You end up lost when you see there's a new reply on a thread you've been following (post count is 67 but yesterday it was 66) and then you go trying to find it for about five minutes. You end up re-reading about 30% of all the posts until you finally find what you were looking for. Repeat until you've read the entire thread 20 times.

But that's not a bad experience compared to when you go read a threaded conversation for the first time when there's over 50 posts — the whole thing is just unreadable. Add to this that even the most technical people can rarely reply to the right post 100% of the time.

The reddit gold feature I mentioned directly addresses what your first paragraph describes. New comments since your last visit are highlighted.

And I don't understand your second paragraph; it never happens to me, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. Could you help me understand why you find these threads unreadable? Do you make use of the "collapse thread" button?

It's not about being lost, it's about not being able to read bigger threads.

The answer is no-thread.

I have yet to look at the features you provide, in detail; however, am I the only one who thinks that the word "moot" is the opposite of what you're trying to achieve? Why would anyone moot anything if they're trying to converse?

Also, your embedding option looks lot more similar to branch.com which I think is strugglig to make a space.

Have you sorted out the legal issues with the name?

Because I'd be wary about using something under a C&D with such a clear case.

Yes we have. Mr Poole "contacted" us:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20408037

It was a very simple question - have you sorted out the legal issues or not?

His lawyers sent you a C&D; you responded to that C&D and now you've launched.

Considering he's been known as moot since 2003, and is known by millions of people as moot, and has a strong link to online discussion forums, I'd think he has an excellent case.

Since, apart from his name, the primary meaning of moot is "closed to debate" (not "open to debate"; you're welcome to provide examples of "moot point" where the meaning is "open to debate" and not "closed to debate") it seems like a weird choice of name.

"Moot" is one of those words whose meaning has evolved to contradict itself [1]. Certainly its primary dictionary definition is "open to debate" [2,3]. Plus the word derives from Old English for "meeting" and is cognate with modern English "meet" [4]. So the Finns do have a case.

But it's a weak case, because (as you imply) that original meaning has been obsolete for a long time, and in modern English people only use "moot" to mean "not worth debating". According to [4], "moot" began its pivot in the 16th century when law students used the word for practice debates where they would argue about mock issues—things that didn't really matter—in order to hone their skills.

Hmm, but then it is internet forum software, isn't it? "Arguing about things that don't matter" might be a perfect match!

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

2. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moot

3. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot

4. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...

We've sorted it out. We found out that there is no case.

As DanBC pointed out, "moot" means the opposite of "open to debate." Honestly, I think Moot is kindof silly for sending the letter in the first place, but he's totally right that your name (moot.it) will cause confusion. Add me to the list of people who thought "Moot.it" meant "Poole."

If Moot were trademarked by 4chan (now there's a laughable proposition), there really would be a case - and a pretty strong one, at that. As it is, I imagine you're right that Moot has no real case against Moot.it, but it also sounds like the letter made no specific C&D demands.

I imagine your product can rise above this based on its merit, but you gotta acknowledge the subtle trolling inherent in the name. I understand why you can't publicly acknowledge this, but it's there anyway.

There is definitely a subtte trolling factor on our name, no reason to hide it. But it does not affect to the fact that moot.it is a damn good name for a product like ours. In case we get popular (which might be the case considering the title of this Hacker News post) this trolling factor will decease.

Speaking strictly about the branding I really think it doesn't matter whether the inherent meaning is closed or open. Product naming is an art form and it doesn't have to be realistic.

I hope we can use Moot successfully on our issue tracker

http://moot.it/issues

So we can "close the debate" on those moots :)

I don't know much about Mr Poole's personal politics, but based on the nature of 4chan it seems pretty hypocritical of him to run to the legal system over someone using an English language word for their product name.

"Yeah, anarchy! Wait, I can't have everything my way?"

    We're experiencing problems and this post was not saved.
    Please copy the post to clipboard, reload and try again.
    Sorry, we're fixing this!

Redis issue?

Yup. We're fixing this :) We still have some hiccups there since it's still beta.

Did you manage to post it again? Can you please describe us how this happened here

http://moot.it/issues

Not a redis issue. This is related to the connection between client & server.

Are there any active forums besides the main moot.it/forum? I tried going to relatively common keywords and most are just people kinda squatting on them during the initial landgrab.

Like we say; we've been up only 8 days. Our forum is currently the most active one and you'll probably get the best picture there. Here is a playground forum where you can fool around freely:

http://moot.it/demos/forum.html

This is hot. However, the "Log in and post" button is inactive out for me. Shouldn't that immediately launch a login/register interface? Otherwise, I have to drag my mouse all the way over to the "log in" link.

It shouldn't be inactive if you have types a post. If, after typing something, it's still inactive then that is a bug! Please let us know what browser you are on in that case and we'll get that fixed.

Here are some: http://moot.it/forum/#!/setting-up#working-moots

Too bad this isn't open source, it's the only thing stopping me from using it. Probably gonna use discourse instead

This is indeed the case right now. We're open sourcing big chunks of code later once they are nicely packaged and documented.

I really like the fact that Moot seems to handle both forum-style posts and on-page comments. As the owner of a content site, I really want both. I've even gone so far as to try to hack Disqus to work as a forum.

If there was an easy import feature for Disqus threads, I'd probably switch right over.

We are aware of this urgent need. You are not alone in this. And you can be sure this is exactly what we are working on.

Impressive performance and clean design. /me interested.

I don't understand the need to claim such a broad copyright license on content submitted.

"When providing us with content or posting content on Moot’s site or related third-party sites, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right AND LICENSE to exercise any and all copyright, trademark, publicity, and database rights you have in the content, in any media known now or in the future."

The "Why do we have this clause" link doesn't feel like it answers that either.

Also, the "Following is guaranteed" bit needs work. It sounds good, but is legally worthless, I expect.

If you run a forum, on what legal basis are you allowed to continue using what user has posted? Doesn't this represent a continuous existential risk for a forum, that such rights will be claimed?

It might be legally worthless but that's what we guarantee.

How would you improve it?

I think there is a massive market for an open source version of a service like this or disqus. An admin panel for management, and a embeddable javascript app in pages.

I wonder if www.discourse.org will ever look at making an embeddable js component.

Whenever you say, "I think there is a massive market", you don't follow up with "for an open source version" haha. :)

One of the reasons I really like Google Groups is that it lets me treat something as a mailing list. By and large, I want to use an email client for serious discussions, not a 'forum' thing. Adding this functionality would be super cool.

Moot is primarly meant for websites and the goal is to keep discussion and the users on the site. This will make users come back and potentia.ly increase traffic on the site.

We're launching email notifications next week.

> the goal is to keep discussion and the users on the site. This will make users come back

Back when I first got online and only had one forum I was interested in, this was true - but it really doesn't scale. Trying to keep up with even 3 active forums by visiting each in turn is painful. Since then, I've pretty much ignored any information source that doesn't have either RSS or email feeds, since I can multiplex hundreds of those with no problem :P

(For a more average-joe version of this, note how facebook has largely replaced independent forums and IRC - people are lazy, and going out of their way to check an external site on a daily basis is much more work than clicking a "like" button and having that site's news become part of their standard routine)

You are absolutely right hence these forums are going to constantly suffer, or they'd be taken in by marketers trying to make a buck over filthy Ads. I don't think people can have serious discussions on such forum platforms who try to appeal to everyone equally.

A free service with no advertising and a very limited business model?

I fail to see why anybody would want to build a community on a service that will disappear in a few months.

We're going to have paid features such as single sign on or private posts on top of our core offering. You can read more about our plans here

http://moot.it/about/

The parent's argument still holds true.

Just because you "plan" to make money does not mean you will make money.

This is true of any service anywhere, even regardless of whether the company makes money or not. Btw, any ideas of a good replacement for Google Reader?

Not related to 4chan in any way

http://betabeat.com/2012/11/4chan-founder-moot-sends-cease-d...

Although my curiosity certainly supports Poole's position. I assumed this was moot monetizing forums.

Ha, yes, I thought it was going to be him from the name as well, until I went to the site and found out otherwise. I suppose moot is a word, though, not just a name. Although the only time I heard it used using the discussion definition instead of the more common one was a Tolkien book or something. Maybe they aren't from the US and people outside the US use it this way.

3 years to launch? It seems a lot of time without the user's consent. Although, nice work, very consistent.

Yup. We felt a little crazy at some point.

Thanks!

If I launched a photo sharing site called Laughing Squid, a large percentage of my ideal demographic would hate me.

If I put a lot of work into something, why would I blow my own foot off for cheap publicity?

Not sure what you're ?ing about.

How does the embedding work, does it fetch html or does it fetch data and then build the html with javascript? When you navigate within the forum I imagine it does the same and loads in place. How close am I?

Very close. It fetches JSON data from api.moot.it, generates HTML with JavaScript and places it on your site. And when you load another page it does the same thing, but only for a smaller portion of the DOM.

Is it necessary for a user to log in separately on every forum or how do you keep people authenticated?

Moot says they use JSON-RPC because a standard REST framework is not suitable.

Can anyone shed some light on how big of a performance boost JSON-RPC provides when dealing with things like notifications?

JSON-RPC is not about performance. A RPC protocol just makes more sense for full-duplex communication where both sending and receiving end can send messages to each other at any time. REST is inherently a request / response pattern and is not designed to build these kinds of "real time" applications. It's about your system architecture. Better to use the right tools for the job.

What happened to this startup 2 years ago that made the same thing ? They received an impressive amount of $$$, and now I don't even remember their name.. any idea ?

Any plans to allow sites to use their existing authentication/identity system, rather then require users to signup with moot to participate in the forum?

SSO is coming for you to be able to integrate into your authentication system.

I really like the features offered (especially the realtime updates), and how you can customise it. Would prefer to host it on my own website though.

Moot architecture is a distributed cloud based service - unless someone wants to set up the dozen or so servers it would require for a basic Moot setup, it wouldn't be feasible even if the infrastructure setup was open sourced.

Go for it! That's the whole point of Moot.

embedding is not the same as hosting

What about SEO? It should be important for a forum. I found most of the smaller forums that i know with google search.

Is there any internationalization planed?

Edit: forgot to say: i'ts awesome!

Thanks!

Absolutely. It's on our short term roadmap. Coming out in next 2 weeks. It's a highly requested feature. Some discussion about it:

http://moot.it/forum/#!/open-word#additional-language-suppor...

Here is a rough draft of RTL (right to left) support.

http://moot.it/demos/rtl.html

You guys rock, really.

I'd pay to be able to host my own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com