
Question: How do I build a discussion board in the HN Style? - secfirstmd
Hi there,
I&#x27;m thinking about building a HN style board for a specific industry that doesnt already have one. I see that recently a banking board just opened up in the same, simple style. Can anyone advise me how yo setup a board in the same style?
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sgrove
I'd recommend checking out Telescope ([http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)),
it's a very feature-rich news site in the style of hn/reddit, it's very
actively developed, has a decent interface/design built-in, and can literally
be deployed just by clicking a link (though you can host it on your own server
if you want). Many news sites posted on hn tend to use telescope for these
very reasons.

You can find out more here: [http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)

And launch your own instance through Giteor here:
[https://giteor.com/deploy?git=com.github.SachaG.Telescope.ma...](https://giteor.com/deploy?git=com.github.SachaG.Telescope.master)

~~~
10dpd
This looks like an awesome approach but a few important considerations:

\- How scalable is hosting on meteor.com?

\- Does Telescope provide an API to let you, for example, create a native
mobile app/browser extension?

~~~
devonbarrett
> How scalable is hosting on meteor.com?

Currently hosting on meteor.com is mainly meant for demoing and testing, not
as a stable production enviroment. However, with the release of Meteor 1.0,
the Meteor Development Group will launch Galaxy, which is a production ready
hosting managed hosting platform.

~~~
sgdesign
Agreed. There are plenty of other options for hosting Meteor apps though
([http://modulus.io](http://modulus.io),
[http://digitalocean.com](http://digitalocean.com), etc.)

And Telescope does have a simple read-only API, as well as an RSS feed.
Depending on the features you need I could probably extend it (or you can
submit a pull request).

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steveklabnik
The source for HN comes with Arc:
[http://arclanguage.org/install](http://arclanguage.org/install)

~~~
lnanek2
Tough to recommend that, though, when it can't even keep links working when I
leave a page open in tabs. Much better off going with a mature, open source
project that isn't crippled and bug ridden. There are quite a few. Personally
it would only take me a day to style a real CMS into looking like it, like
Drupal since I've written Drupal plugins for far more advanced stuff before,
so I wouldn't even need to hobble myself with a site type specific project
like Telescope.

~~~
steveklabnik
This isn't a bug, really, more of an implementation side effect.

~~~
bri3d
Aren't "implementation side effects" leading to a mismatch between a user's
expected behavior and the actual behavior a bug? Where's the line? :)

More seriously I don't think Arc is a good idea for an HN clone; the lispiness
of it all is cute but the way continuations are implemented doesn't seem to
scale in a good way in real life. Some form of cursoring like what Reddit uses
for pagination is probably better. Plus the news example couples the
layout/theme to the UI code in painful ways.

~~~
krapp
>Aren't "implementation side effects" leading to a mismatch between a user's
expected behavior and the actual behavior a bug? Where's the line? :)

It is kind of funny that a forum like this, with this layout, and that
"implementation side effect", written in a similar style in PHP would be
utterly lambasted here.

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fendrak
You probably want to check out:
[https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki](https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki)

Specifically: [https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/how-
to...](https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news)

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lastcanal
Take a look at Lamernews
([https://github.com/antirez/lamernews](https://github.com/antirez/lamernews)).
It is written in Ruby by the author Redis. It uses Redis as the primary
database.

Here is it in action: [http://lamernews.com/](http://lamernews.com/)

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kbar13
I think that the problem isn't getting the right software/design (anyone can
do that). The problem is getting the right community and mods to keep it going
once you've started.

Good luck m8

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carbocation
There are many ways to do it. Basically you need to store posts and display
them in a nested format, meaning that you should pull down the data and then
nest it based on child-parent relationships.

I wrote something similar in golang. An example is
[http://askgolang.com/](http://askgolang.com/) and the package itself with
demo code is at
[https://github.com/carbocation/go.graf](https://github.com/carbocation/go.graf)

Of course, this can be done in any language, but I found to quite pleasant
(and safe).

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dickler
It's pretty simple to sart off with php/mysql. Paul Graham does a lot of data
mining on it for moderation (he made applying naive bayes to spam filtering
famous a while back).

If you don't have programming skills you're better of off just starting a
subreddit. The hard part in these is building the community.

A better strategy might be to find a subreddit with a community and try to
take over it somehow (communicate with mods or pay them to take over).

~~~
krapp
Could easily be done with a framework of course - probably something
lightweight. I've got competing implementations in Laravel 4 and Slim
Framework being worked on right now. I know someone else is working on a HN
news clone in Laravel as well, it was mentioned in a thread somewhere.

But yeah definitely, getting people to join would be the hard part. I've seen
people build what they thought were the greatest forums ever and just sort of
expect people to show up but they don't.

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gexla
You could just use the same code which runs reddit.

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit](https://github.com/reddit/reddit)

~~~
peterarmstrong
Beware: you can only do that if you want to open source your entire site. It
used to be the AGPL, now it's the CPAL, which has the same effect.

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nvartolomei
Or this one:
[https://github.com/maccman/monocle](https://github.com/maccman/monocle)

To me it looks way better, but it depends on your needs. Ruby.

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atko
I started working on a similar project several weeks ago in ASP.NET and C#.
Implementing proper nested comments is a big challenge for a beginner like me,
so I dropped development until school projects slow down a little. I'm
thinking of opensourcing it but I don't know if there is any interest for
that. The project is located at a weird domain (yes, I need a better name,
feel free to recommend one) which is www.forbidme.com

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diminish
Here is how:

First become a pg in your specific area, someone whom everyone in this
specific industry sees as highly knowledgeable, good-networked and.... for SW
choose a good one suggested here. Use hnsearch to find more (for example USV,
lobster.rs, reddit source code)

~~~
clarry
> [..] (for example USV, lobster.rs, reddit source code)

It's lobste.rs

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ShirsenduK
Have you looked at discourse? Its more of a discussion board.

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anishkothari
You could try Telescope, a similar project built with Meteor

[http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)

edit: see more informative post above :-)

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abhi21284
Here is one based on django/mezzanine

[https://github.com/stephenmcd/drum](https://github.com/stephenmcd/drum)

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secfirstmd
Thanks guys, really appreciate the suggestions :)

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secfirstmd
Thanks for the overwhelming reponse guys

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epa
If you have to ask....

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elwell
no, that's what reddit's for.

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notastartup
anything written in python?

