How is this forum so extremely fast?

archuser38013 · 2024-05-20 11:17:35

Compared to other, cough cough linuxquestions, linux forums.

Load times are instantaneous.

I get that linuxquestions may be much more trafficked due to catering to all distro. Even still this forum is faster than any website load I have experienced ever really.

Is it something like the cloudflare content delivery system or what? I know cloudflares to geo location, forgotten what it's called, they would also load at a similar speed. CDS - content delivery system iirc?

I know arch users are the cutting edge of technology so also follows their forum would be at the forefront too.

Last edited by archuser38013 (2024-05-20 11:17:56)

Allan · 2024-05-20 11:59:57

archuser38013 wrote:

I know arch users are the cutting edge of technology so also follows their forum would be at the forefront too.

Wrong... It is old software without all the modern bloat.

Trilby · 2024-05-20 12:03:28

And it probably will not be fast for long as there are plans to replace it with something "newer".

fmc000 · 2024-05-20 12:26:41

s/newer/manure/g

cmm11 · 2024-05-20 12:45:49

It runs on Arch.

kokoko3k · 2024-05-20 14:59:42

the cutting edge of technology

Speaking of web, that produces exactly the opposite, so the answer is exactly the opposite: it is using a good old speedy tech.

icar · 2024-05-20 15:10:53

Probably running on a single VPS. The joy of not having to wait for cold lambdas, Node starts, internal AWS routing, slow DBs... And I bet it's extremely cheap.

archuser38013 · 2024-05-23 05:32:13

Yes on the same note arch is paradoxical in that it uses cutting edge packages yet is modular so can be run as bare bones as one likes.

I initially started arching due to wanting lack of bloat but then my work requiring some very cutting edge packages it was also of benefit. Having everything in pacman was great for that and would install it on remote machines whenever I could over debian or such where I would have to hunt for some obscure repo to enable. Failing that aur would have me covered in the 5% of times the main pacman didn't have it.

archuser38013 · 2024-05-23 05:35:22

Allan wrote:

archuser38013 wrote:
I know arch users are the cutting edge of technology so also follows their forum would be at the forefront too.
Hmm now you mention it this forum is like a blast from the past to the glory days of the mid 2000s era where the forum was king; with 90% of internet users now on having emigrated to social media.
Wrong... It is old software without all the modern bloat.

That sounds just like how I had my skeletal websites setup.

Hated all the modern CMS rubbish and just made the few pages in basic html from scratch with some tiny js for functions. Good learning experience and also sites are/were lightening fast.

I resisted the constant harassment from peers of "ffs just use wordpress why do you always have to make things 100x more difficult!!!" and suchlike.

Last edited by archuser38013 (2024-05-23 05:43:17)

archuser38013 · 2024-05-23 05:38:58

Trilby wrote:

And it probably will not be fast for long as there are plans to replace it with something "newer".

Oh, the admins are succumbing to pressure?

Youtube is the extreme version of newness for newness's sake. Constantly changing the layout seemingly every few months and most times making things less intuitive. It seems the same as how supermarkets will randomly move their produce. Perhaps in both cases some kind of marketing tactic where confused customers are good customers.

Trilby · 2024-05-23 12:42:33

archuser38013 wrote:

Oh, the admins are succumbing to pressure?

Note that the word "admin" here can have different meanings that refer to very different sets of people. I'm not inclined to give names of the guilty parties (who did not succumb to pressure, but were the pressure), though the discussion history is public and can be found by anyone motivated to look for it. But I will note that if "admins" refers to the forum moderators and admins then this statement couldn't be further from the truth.

The planned replacement is to be Discourse. The existing* moderation and admin team almost unanimously fought vigorously against this option - but the battle was lost. They did not succumb to pressure, they just don't really have authority in such matters. Forum staff have authority over forum content not server software. It's a different set of staffers who make the server software decisions.

The only saving grace is that the transition has been so slow - or effectively completely stalled - that it may not even happen in my lifetime.

*Note: Existing, and some former. While I'm not sure they'd state it publicly, I'm pretty sure this issue was at least part of the reason some long-time forum staffers have "retired".

EDIT: Rereading my post I want to clarify, I really don't have any desire to sow dissent. But I value transparency, and I think the decision process behind this warrants a little more light on it. While technically publicly available, most forum users are not even aware of it.

Last edited by Trilby (2024-05-23 12:51:58)

gromit · 2024-05-23 13:13:10

Trilby wrote:

Note that the word "admin" here can have different meanings that refer to very different sets of people. I'm not inclined to give names of the guilty parties (who did not succumb to pressure, but were the pressure), though the discussion history is public and can be found by anyone motivated to look for it.
[...]
EDIT: Rereading my post I want to clarify, I really don't have any desire to sow dissent. But I value transparency, and I think the decision process behind this warrants a little more light on it. While technically publicly available, most forum users are not even aware of it.

In order to increase on transparency and have a bit less FUD, here is the link to the (lengthy) discussion on the infrastructure repository: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … issues/257

If you want to test, there has since been a test instance of discourse setup to play around with the moderation features and to get a general feeling if it suits our needs: https://discourse.sandbox.archlinux.org/

ewaller · 2024-05-24 00:06:53

gromit wrote:

If you want to test, there has since been a test instance of discourse setup to play around with the moderation features and to get a general feeling if it suits our needs: https://discourse.sandbox.archlinux.org/

For clarification, that is a sandbox not to be used for anything serious. Also, it is not my desire to spend time moderating it. If it starts to be misused in any way we will likely shut it down.

mesaprotector · 2024-05-24 07:04:41

The moment the sandbox took two seconds to load in my browser I immediately stopped being interested in spending any more time trying it out. I can only hope that I buy a PC that's easy to maintain (meaning not Nvidia) before the move to Discourse happens, because I'd find it very unpleasant to try to participate in a forum like that.

I feel like as "dated" as the current forum looks, it's very functional. Discourse is trendy but will look just as dated in 10 years, while not being remotely functional. Look at the Nvidia forums and how you can't even search for text in a thread without scrolling down little by little to load the whole thread first. Fortunately, as has been mentioned, this supposed move has been in progress for several years now. Maybe it'll keep getting postponed until an era where the dominant trends in UI/UX are less miserable than they currently are.

Last edited by mesaprotector (2024-05-24 07:07:55)

MAYBL8 · 2024-05-24 11:40:44

discourse link doesn't open for me

change that it was just really slow

Last edited by MAYBL8 (2024-05-24 11:42:08)

gromit · 2024-05-24 11:58:30

MAYBL8 wrote:

discourse link doesn't open for me

It was shortly down to add an extension which required a rebuild

icar · 2024-05-24 15:34:33

I personally don't mind because I have a fast Internet connection and a good computer. But, given this forum is accessed and moderated by people that might be negatively impacted by the new requirements of Discourse, I don't see the point of the change.

Mortimer Houghton · 2024-05-24 17:47:00

I noticed the discourse sandbox can only be viewed in a text browser (w3m in my case). No login or posting features seem available.

ugjka · 2024-05-24 20:33:00

I don't care about speed or JavaScript, but discourse is an eyesore. I spent like half minute trying to figure out how to navigate the damn thing (I have a neurological disease)

Last edited by ugjka (2024-05-24 20:34:17)

seth · 2024-05-24 23:03:42

@Mortimer Houghton, discourse currently tries to set object.style.aspectRatio to check whether your browser is worthy to run it (obviously the feature itself is utterly irrelevant to some forum software)
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_pr … -ratio.php

Older™ browsers, browsers w/ limited CSS or javascript support or any intervention by eg. noscript and possibly anti-tracking extensions will relegate you to the sidelines.
Basically you need a recent need a mozilla or blink browser.

Mortimer Houghton · 2024-05-25 02:40:53

seth wrote:

@Mortimer Houghton, discourse currently tries to set object.style.aspectRatio to check whether your browser is worthy to run it (obviously the feature itself is utterly irrelevant to some forum software)
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_pr … -ratio.php
Older™ browsers, browsers w/ limited CSS or javascript support or any intervention by eg. noscript and possibly anti-tracking extensions will relegate you to the sidelines.
Basically you need a recent need a mozilla or blink browser.

Thanks for the answer. I understand my browsing habits largely amount to a rounding error, so I don't expect any consideration in the decision process, and at least I can still read it.

Trilby · 2024-05-25 02:48:39

I find it hard to see this a successful effort of increasing inclusiveness when it causes people to self-identify as rounding error.

Rest assured, for every two real people excluded by the change, there will be at least one new hypothetical person that could be included.

Last edited by Trilby (2024-05-25 02:50:43)

seth · 2024-05-25 08:43:39

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … issues/257

Discourse
* https://www.discourse.org/
* There seems to be a lot of bells and whistles that increase its complexity but I have no experience with it.
* Discourse ... design philosophy seems to be in the mindset of catering to the majority who have high powered systems, good network connections, and "modern" (GUI) browsers. The Arch community has always seemed to work hard to not needlessly marginalize those who have limited bandwidth, old hardware, or text-mode browsers; so the use of a tool like discourse strikes me as either antithetical to our existing community ethos, or a sign of a significant change in direction.

https://www.discourse.org/about#browser

Discourse is dEsIgNeD FoR ThE NeXt 10 YeArS Of tHe iNtErNeT, so the minimum browser requirements are high.
Discourse supports the lAtEsT, sTaBlE ReLeAsEs oF AlL MaJoR BrOwSeRs aNd pLaTfOrMs.

UX-wise the eternal scroll is just annoying AF.
Disabling js actually makes discourse usable (at least for reading), searching a thread requires to use the built-in function (because of the eternal scrolling bs) but discourse doesn't intercept ctrl+f, which is good and bad at the same time. There's perhaps no good answer because the underlying problem is dumb.
There're a bunch of custom shortcuts, several straight up Shift+[:alpha:], so make sure the focus is correct when typing anything or you just typed a shortcut

Social-wise it apparently promotes infantility and idiocy (post-voting follows the idea that we all should eat shit because billions of flies *cannot* be wrong…)

Design-wise¹ (tl;dr - smartphone driven clusterfuck):
There're two designs (default/full width and "fully") which are the same and despite their names just cater to smartphones (which is generally understandable but doesn't fit the topic)
We apparently don't know how to make use of horizontal screen estate, even *with* all the modern stuff for rEsPoNsIvE DeSiGn, so let's just delegate that to whitespace and hide some of the whitespace with an idiotic, pointless timeline.
Instead we've vertical cruft like the topic stats and some pointless "read more threads" advert at the bottom that also breaks the design matrix introduced by that silly timeline.
Likewise vertical estate gets wasted to the discourse header (but not the arch one, no idea whether they're separate for technical or dumb reasons)
And then more vertical estate gets wasted to a pointless likeshareandsubscribe footer that - there's even a "share on the farcebook" feature on the date (that serves as direct link to the post)
And for some reason the "default" design doesn't support the night mode - you have to explicitly set it to the (otherwise equivalent) "default (full-width)" to activate that feature.

Security-wise my biggest concern (which is hypothetical, I know that discourse manipulates teh clipboard but not to what extent and whether there're any security-precautions outside maybe the explicit actions in code segments. The complexity is an inherently looming problem here) is pastejacking via js or css, because users *will* frequently copy and paste stuff into an interactive shell. It doesn't matter that one "should" not do that.

-----
¹PSA-rant: this is is communication design in a nutshell: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a6/e6/9b/a6e6 … 39fc2e.jpg
The message is conveyed with minimum information:
The colors are reduced to two - with maximum contrast, the shape is an upscaled 20x20px icon w/ 45° rotations, the rounded caps are consistent)

This is also why the modernized upgrades like https://img.olympics.com/images/image/p … ur9xqkooio or https://i.pinimg.com/474x/ce/0d/8b/ce0d … 88ea73.jpg suck.
They're not trying to inform you, but to imitate an iconic concept without understanding it or what drove it.
A reasonable upgrade would pay more attention to limited resolutions of digital display (no, your retina display doesn't even come close to print) and aliasing concerns. Not turn it into color-vomit.
I wonder what reminded me of that situation…

ugjka · 2024-05-25 16:25:06

I'd go with whatever d-lang forums uses https://forum.dlang.org/

seth · 2024-05-25 16:40:09

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Arch Linux

#1 2024-05-20 11:17:35

How is this forum so extremely fast?

#2 2024-05-20 11:59:57

Re: How is this forum so extremely fast?

#3 2024-05-20 12:03:28

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#4 2024-05-20 12:26:41

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#5 2024-05-20 12:45:49

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#6 2024-05-20 14:59:42

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#7 2024-05-20 15:10:53

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#8 2024-05-23 05:32:13

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#9 2024-05-23 05:35:22

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#10 2024-05-23 05:38:58

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#11 2024-05-23 12:42:33

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#12 2024-05-23 13:13:10

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#13 2024-05-24 00:06:53

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#14 2024-05-24 07:04:41

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#15 2024-05-24 11:40:44

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#16 2024-05-24 11:58:30

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#17 2024-05-24 15:34:33

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#18 2024-05-24 17:47:00

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#19 2024-05-24 20:33:00

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#20 2024-05-24 23:03:42

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#21 2024-05-25 02:40:53

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#22 2024-05-25 02:48:39

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#23 2024-05-25 08:43:39

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#24 2024-05-25 16:25:06

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#25 2024-05-25 16:40:09

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