

My Project: Qotr, a quote board for your friends - ajacksified
http://qotr.net/

======
ajacksified
Many of us are familiar with <http://bash.org>, or have our own Google doc
full of funny things people have said in IRC, Campfire, et. al; my friend and
I put together a free service where you can create your own quote board.

Boards are public by default; you can set up a whitelist to keep things
private, and set mods and admins who can administer quotes and board settings.
You can also set up sub-boards, such as "x.qotr.net" and "z.y.x.qotr.net";
permissions and quotes are inherited.

It has an API built in as well; you can make requests with a token you are
assigned on your account page after sign up. It's a RESTful interface, so you
can get/post/put/delete quotes to boards.

It uses PHP and MongoDB, hosted on EC2. We built this mostly in a weekend, and
open-sourced a PHP framework that came out of it at
<http://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint> (although we need to, um, build
documentation and examples.) We're working on rebuilding and vastly
simplifying Mint as well, over the coming months.

~~~
yaz
The website looks very good in spite of the distracting ads. Good luck! Did
you use a design library like bootstrap?

~~~
ajacksified
Thanks; we had an internal debate on wether or not to use ads, and we decided
to see what happened if we included them. It is backed by bootstrap.

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mappu
You've done very well to find a four-letter domain name for a 'weekend
project', let alone a relevant one. My circle uses a self-hosted homegrown
wiki for this sort of thing, so we don't have searching or sorting, but
content is malleable, organisable and totally free-form.

A point to make about our system, is that everyone is trusted enough for us to
not employ any sort of account system. We do however publically log IPs with a
hash of the user-agent, so people can at least see if the same person was
responsible for multiple edits. Since this sort of information can be gathered
by any website, i like to think making it public gives our non-technical users
a more solid understanding of how their actions online can be traced.

~~~
ajacksified
Thanks; we were both pretty surprised that it was available. We kind of named
the site based on the domain, rather than the other way around.

I like the idea of making edits public - kind of Stack-Overflow-like in a way,
so that if someone with mod access edits your post, you can see who. We could
also put in an option to allow everyone mod access, more wiki-like; if you
have a trusted whitelist that could access your board, only those people would
be allowed to read, and therefore edit.

Cool ideas. Thanks!

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rollypolly
Who owns the commented we post? Do they automatically become the property of
Olivine Labs LLC? The ToS makes no mention of this.

~~~
ajacksified
Updated; you own the content, and grant us a license to use. IANAL; I modeled
it after several other sites.

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paulovsk
Here <http://qotr.net/Quotes/> the quotes draw less attention than the buttons
themselves. You could make the font bigger or more attractive, I guess.

What language did you guys use in this project?

~~~
ajacksified
Yeah, that's a good point. We should tone down the buttons a bit; maybe use
colored arrows (a la Reddit) instead of bright buttons.

We used PHP and MongoDB with our homegrown framework
(<https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint>); we're working on solidifying the
framework and getting documentation and examples together.

------
BrokenWits
For those not reading the title, link is <http://qotr.net>

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iRobot
Good luck

A Lot of developers have a MOTD file in their applications, before I compiled
my motd file I looked everywhere for a simple motd feed but gave up as it was
all too much time and trouble and quicker to compile my own off the various
text files out there. Maybe a future market but I doubt it (there again porn
sites do quite well and you can get it for free)

You _seriously_ need some sort of moderation, no-ones going to stay on a page
where on the first page one of the quotes is "does this work"

~~~
ajacksified
We do have moderation, and you can set admins and mods on your own board, but
I'm trying to refrain from using it too much. I hope that downvotes / new
quotes drown out the 'does this work' kind of 'quotes'. I prefer a more open
form of governance than heavily moderated, but maybe I need to prune some of
the bad quotes?

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pierreten
Ugh, seriously? Is this what modern web application development has come to?

~~~
ajacksified
It's a weekend project that a friend and I put together. If you have any
constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it.

It's a fun project that we built for ourselves, then opened it up to whoever
else wants to use it for free. Thanks for calling it "modern web development",
though; we're proud of the framework and our implementation. Even if you were
being sarcastic.

