
Hn-Gopher: Hacker News Over the Gopher Protocol - chrissnell
https://github.com/michael-lazar/hn-gopher
======
dang
This is fabulous, of course, but it's a quasidupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291),
and we definitely don't want more than one meta submission on the front page
at the same time.

I suggest reposting it in a month or so. Gopher is immortal, after all.

~~~
chrissnell
Hmmm, I didn’t really see this one as “meta”, since is a singular GH project.
It wasn’t listed in the other story, either. Seems kind of harsh to kill it
but okay...

~~~
dang
It isn't only the meta aspect but also that it's a piggyback submission, i.e.
a spinoff of another. Those tend to get upvotes and diminish variety on the
front page. Since front page slots are HN's scarcest resource and the hivemind
thrives on variety, we usually moderate follow-up submissions pretty firmly. A
better place for correlated links is within the primary thread, where indeed
this one is happily situated.

Once everyone's mental caches have turned over a few times, this will make a
nice submission in its own right.

------
TimTheTinker
I miss gopher, probably somewhat like folks a little older than me might say
they miss dial-in BBS’s. All sorts of interesting and arcane content you could
find, from a myriad of sources.

Nowadays the most varied content seems to come from only a handful of sources.

~~~
verri
Looking at how simple the protocol actually is, I find it hard to believe this
protocol actually died because of copyright claims. The structured menu system
is certainly something the modern web could use, especially now more and more
people are relying on mobile devices. But I could do without the 3270 support
:)

Also funny to note we can find discussions dating back to pre-2000 where
people rant over how “bloated” the web has become and how we should go back to
gopher.

------
klez
Finally something that has "gopher" in the name and is actually about the
gopher protocol.

I've seen a dozen or so submission here in the last year that had "gopher" in
the name but where actually about golang.

------
radarsat1
This is actually a really nice way to read HN. I just tried it in Emacs with
[https://github.com/ardekantur/gopher.el](https://github.com/ardekantur/gopher.el)
and it seems to work well!

------
x2398dh1
Something happened to me recently when I was attempting to browse a Gopher
site via Firefox...I opened the site, and that site opened another tab to the
same site, and so on recursively every ~200mS or so until my computer's RAM
was saturated. I had to force terminate Firefox. It was funny because it
reminded me of the type of malicious WaReZ that you would see in the 90s.

~~~
no_protocol
I also had this happen trying to open a PDF in Firefox recently.

~~~
brudgers
It will happen if:

    
    
      about:preferences#applications ->
        Portable Document Format (PDF) ->
          Use firefox
    

is set. A fix is to set

    
    
      about:preferences#applications ->
        Portable Document Format (PDF) ->
          Preview in firefox
    

The problem can be caused (in Ubuntu 16.04) by selecting Firefox as the system
default for PDF viewing.

------
j_s
source:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313113](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313113)

> NuSkooler: _Don 't forget HN over Gopher: gopher://hngopher.com:70/_

on "Different ways to read Hacker News" |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291)

------
digi_owl
works like a charm, though the last update was too old for me to get to read
this discussion via Gopher.

~~~
staz
Don't see the reason why it's not a live proxy

~~~
digi_owl
Could be something with how Gopher is effective a file transfer protocol.

Meaning that each entry shown is either a file or a directory.

Thus i am guessing the scarper takes each discussion and convert that into
individual text files to be delivered over Gopher, rather than have a custom
Gopher server that generates the files on access.

~~~
huntie
There's no reason why it coudn't be a live site. A live version would require
a custom gopher server though, and it looks like they're using Gophernicus. So
what they're doing would be analogous to serving static files with NGINX but
having the files updated periodically.

------
duxup
Ski U Mah!

