Show HN: New project for on-demand chat rooms | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: New project for on-demand chat rooms

urshoutbox.com

37 pointstdondich33 comments

I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc.

I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking.

The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get people discussing in real time. The idea came from looking at popular blogs and news sites which have comment sections where people are posting so quickly trying to have what appears to be almost real-time conversations in a limited way. This is meant to get those conversations in a more real-time appropriate environment.

Think of it as irc but for today's clients. I'm surprised that there wasn't really similar options out there. Most of today's chat tools are either mobile only, require video, or limit the number of participants. If you know of competitors in this space and I'm just an idiot for not finding them, please let me know.

I look forward to hearing people's thoughts.

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This post set off the voting ring detector, but I turned it off because we want to see original work on HN.

All: A voting ring is when people get their friends to upvote their posts. This is against the rules—we want stories because they're good, not because they're being promoted. Also, it's not in your interests to do, because even when we restore a post's rank, other penalties for ring-voting still apply.

Also, the OP included a long text description, but those don't show up when the story has a URL. You can post it as a comment in the thread. (tdondich, if you don't have the text handy anymore, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send it to you).

How do you determine that it's a voting ring scenario? I'm not necessarily looking for specifics. Just wondering what the basis is for saying X upvotes came from friends. Or these two people are friends.

I logged in with a username that was a few hundred kilobytes long. Couple of seconds later the service goes down. Could just be a coincidence.

I love that the HN version of kicking the tires is a battery of exploits.

That's how you test a service: just put it on HN. If the traffic does not take it down, it's the hackers around here.

My own chat site went down hard within minutes of hitting the HN front page. Hilarious in retrospect.

That's not an exploit, just a simple bug.

I'm so sorry. I crashed your room. Can I send you an e-mail saying how I did it?

EDIT: I hesitate to post my e-mail to HN or to paste publicly how I did it, but it was trivial. Reply with your e-mail and I'll show you how I did it. It's probably a simple fix.

Yes. Please do. taylor@urshoutbox.com

Sent. :)

I love how the last thing he said was "well I had to do some sanitization if I'm going to submit it to a place called Hacker News. Otherwise I'd get owned pretty quickly".

Yep. That didn't take long!

We are currently developing the similar chatroom service. https://www.underline.io/chat/hackernews Since we are developing, it's not reliable.

I'm sorry. I pasted all emoji's from the cheat sheet and it crashed...

Heh, I'll need to put in a character limit. Thanks for the input!

It continues to ask me for a username, even after I tried several of varying lengths with simple alphanumerics. I'm on Chrome for Android, FWIW.

You mean, like IRC?

A bit, but more available to people and quick to share.

There are plenty of web IRC clients.

but any good one?

Woops, there it goes again. This time the page says "Bummer." No files overwritten or..?!

Edit a minute later: and back.

I've moved the server to one with more resources. It should be back up now. :)

And then it died :P

> The Chat Server connection was terminated.

> The Chat Server is currently unavailable.

That was my fault. I was fiddling around and played with sending some raw data over the socket, then it crashed.

Restarted.

I'm moving the server right now. Will give an update.

It makes safari cry on an iPhone.

I love how it amateurishly it crashes. could be a handy HN hangout place to vent or troll.

PS. Don't get me wrong people, i DO love it, but it just seems to crash too easily. These things happen to all of us. It could still be a cool place to hang out and vent on HN.

really wishing i had downvote powers right about now. since i dont, let me just pipe in with a comment about how arrogant this comment is. good software developers arent born, they're trained. you really should be constructive in your criticism.

i provided enough constructive feedback to the maker on his chat.

cool. your original comment just came off very insulting and not terribly insightful/valuable. glad you gave him some pointers elsewhere

Good software developers also develop thick enough skin at some point to not take "your software is crashing a lot" personally.

Troll dens suck, but so do hugboxes.

The old server crumbled due to unexpected popularity. The new one should be a bit more stable. Thanks for helping!

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