Ask HN: Can Scoop be saved? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can Scoop be saved?

5 pointsorionblastar3 comments

Scoop was written in the late 1990's to copy the Slashdot system for CMS websites. It used to power The Daily KOS and the Howard Dean websites. It is still in use at Kuro5hin and Husi and others, but it is written in an old version of Perl for Apache1 and may not even be Y2K compliant. Hackers seem to break it a lot and Kuro5hin itself has gone down too many times. Can someone convert it to Apache2 and modern Perl? The source code I saved to Github here: https://github.com/BlastarIndia/scoop

Rusty Foster once raised money to fix it for the CMF, but ended up using the money to fix his house or something. That was before Kickstarter. Anyone know how to fix it or want to fix it? I think there are people interested in running it on modern systems.

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As someone who used to develop on Scoop as part of my day job, I would say: probably not.

The problem is twofold. First, Scoop doesn't really do anything anymore that other software can't do as well. Its killer feature was user diaries, which allowed user-generated content in an age when most systems didn't. But those days are long past now, so just supporting UGC in a semi-elegant way doesn't attract people by itself the way it used to in, say, 2004.

Second, as you indicate, it's accrued an absolutely shocking amount of technical debt, mostly from many years of neglect. This makes switching to another system less off-putting than it normally would be, since if you stick with Scoop you're going to be doing as much or more work bringing and keeping it up to date as you would by making a switch to an alternative product. And at least if you make a switch you get ongoing support and modern features.

So, anything's possible, but given these two factors I have a feeling that if someone were going to step forward to save Scoop, they would have done it by now. The fact that nobody has implies that the audience of people interested in running it on modern systems is tiny at best.

So if I was still running a site on Scoop, I'd spend my time looking for good alternatives and planning how to get moved onto one rather than looking around for someone to bail out a ship that has more or less already sunk.

If I remember The Daily Kos wrote their own Scoop replacement in Python and Django or something. But at one time Scoop was very popular.

For example I have a 128M RAM Linux 3.X VPS with Apache2 and run Wordpress on it with MySQL and always seem to get out of RAM errors with the MySQL database. Scoop uses Linux 2.X and Apache1 and an old version of Perl but can run on a 64M Linux 2.X Apache1 VPS and never have out of RAM errors. For some strange reason this older software Scoop can be used on cheaper VPS hosts, which is why some people still want to use it.

I've tried Scoop replacements like Wordpress and PHPBB and others, and on a 128M VPS I always get out of RAM errors with MySQL and then I get "Cannot connect to Database" on my webpages and I am forced to log into SSH and reboot the VPS to fix it. My host won't increase the RAM for me to 256M even if I pay more, and I am stuck with 128M and my out of RAM errors.

I knew a few people who ported Scoop to Apache2 and modern Perl, one was named Ron Paul and ran NetMoneyChat but someone had hacked his server and then he was trolled and then he killed himself. There was a few others who did that but none of them ever released the code.

My interest in Scoop is that it has a low RAM profile, all of the modern CMS software seem to give me out of RAM errors with MySQL with only 128M of RAm on my VPS. But I cannot run Scoop because it is designed for older systems.

I might just end up writing my own CMS in PHP and make a Scoop or even Hacker News clone and hope it can run in 128M of RAM without out of memory errors.

http://kur.o5h.in/

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