Hopefully you support your own authentication as well, so when the site inevitably gets hacked the russian mafiya doesn’t read my deep space 9 slash fanfic mailing list on gmail.
But seriously, I tend to use a different login/name to every site as I am extremely paranoid. I know a proper oath auth system won’t expose my google password, but I don’t want to give out my google name either.
Is it something you will sell, a la XenForo? Or will you offer it hosted? Or only use it for your own site?
I’d love to see an API that make it easy for others to integrate with other systems for single sign on (WP, custom apps, etc.). If it lends itself to it, embeddable would be good. Of course, these speculations and suggestions all are based on zero knowledge of the project/product. Im excited to see what you’ve cooked up!
You forgot to add “in addition to our own login system”.
Right?
I guess, but I read forum password exposure exploits every day now. That wouldn’t happen if everything was done through OAuth 2.0. Latest:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Nvidia-Phandroid-Online-Forums-Hacked-Passwords-Stolen-250501/
Part of the problem is that they used compromised hashes, but still. Not storing the password in any form is the best and ultimate form of password security.
I’d love to see an API that make it easy for others to integrate with other systems for single sign on
Yes, that makes sense. We want to have some obvious extensibility points for people to contribute to.
Is it something you will sell, a la XenForo? Or will you offer it hosted? Or only use it for your own site?
It will be 100% free open source software. Download it and do what you like. We are looking at providing one-click amazon EC2, Heroku, etc etc install scripts as well. Eventually we will get into self-hosting, but right now making it awesome is the #1 priority, as well as a few key early adopters to provide crucial feedback.
(To elaborate on “we already like it more than any forum software we’ve ever used” Man, the current q23 forum software I am typing this on right now is horrible. No multi-quote. No highlight/select quote. I can’t even read the other posts while I’m composing this reply (we use a slide-up overlay panel for replies / edits).)
That does sound sweet. What about a mobile version? Is there a good way to read your forums on a tablet or smartphone like NeoGAF mobile or something like tapatalk? Or is it just designed from the ground up to work well on those devices?
Yes, we are explicitly designing for mobile devices, and tablets. Since that’s like the future and stuff, wouldn’t it be crazy not to?
This may change in the future. But just now, the PC is a better place to write long text (like reply long rants).
I don’t disagree, but most forum activity is reading, not writing. And many posts are quite short. Like this one. And yours.
With modern dictation, tablets can work fine even for longer-form posts.
Would OAuth allow a single sign on, ala Disqus? Where I can have a single “wumpusforum” login and then just hop between wumpusFora without having to establish a new account at each?
This would be neat. Plus imagine the opportunities for username goldrushing!
Not really, unless we host all the forums ourselves on our server, like Disqus does. While we do plan to get into hosting, remember that we allow and encourage everyone to run their own copy of this open source software. Anything else would require reinventing the concept of online identity a little, which I am not averse to taking on, but will be … challenging.
Did I mention that we bought a $9,000 server which should arrive tomorrow? 128 GB ram, 8 core top-of-the-line Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU (bend over!), dual mirrored Intel boot SSDs, six 2.5" 1TB HDDs in RAID 10.
It’s gonna be awesome.
Nice. Kudos dude. Can’t wait to see the software you’re nailing down, it sounds great.
You’re buying hardware when you don’t know if it’ll take off? I would have assumed you’d use something like EC2 for the easy scaling. Then again it’s not a particularly expensive server, so maybe you plan to use it for your dev environment or something.
Is there a screenshot of this somewhere that I missed? Xenforo is pretty much the best-looking forum software I’ve seen to date…interested to see how this looks.
Sweet, what OS are you going to run on it? Moutian Lion? All you creative types like the Macs. :)
Somehow I missed this thread completely. If this is going to be open source, how would one go about contributing? Is that not a real option until development is further down the line?
note: javascript is not my strong suit, but that’s my main motivation to try and help. Also I care about forum software and I’ve never contributed to any OSS.
You’re buying hardware when you don’t know if it’ll take off?
I’m fairly confident it will. Can anyone outside of extreme forum geeks even name a type of forum? There are no obvious leaders in this space. There will be when I’m done.
Then again it’s not a particularly expensive server
How expensive does it need to be? This is the fastest Xeon CPU you can buy, and the OS is on SSDs. Adding 8 more cores (for a total of 16) wouldn’t do much for us. 128GB of ram ain’t exactly chopped liver, either.
I would have assumed you’d use something like EC2 for the easy scaling.
IMHO EC2 is expensive for what you get. You’re paying for uber-flexibility, and that isn’t cheap. It’s pretty easy to generate a $500/month server bill on EC2 without breaking much of a sweat, and that’d be 18 months until you’ve paid for this $9k server.
Xenforo is pretty much the best-looking forum software I’ve seen to date…interested to see how this looks.
Imagine Xenforo, but with less junk on the screen. More use of mouseovers (and related touch-friendly metaphors) to keep the screen uncluttered. And no more pagination, just an endless stream. Have you ever used Sparrow on the iPhone? Look closely at that. Very very closely.
If this is going to be open source, how would one go about contributing?
It’ll be on GitHub. Join GitHub if you haven’t already.
But really, what os are you going to run on it? I believe you’re a Microsoft guy, but it’s not clear to me that you’d pick Windows server for something like this.
I have, love it. Thanks.