

Ask HN: Can Scoop be saved? - orionblastar

Scoop was written in the late 1990&#x27;s to copy the Slashdot system for CMS websites. It used to power The Daily KOS and the Howard Dean websites. It is still in use at Kuro5hin and Husi and others, but it is written in an old version of Perl for Apache1 and may not even be Y2K compliant. Hackers seem to break it a lot and Kuro5hin itself has gone down too many times. Can someone convert it to Apache2 and modern Perl? The source code I saved to Github here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BlastarIndia&#x2F;scoop<p>Rusty Foster once raised money to fix it for the CMF, but ended up using the money to fix his house or something. That was before Kickstarter. Anyone know how to fix it or want to fix it? I think there are people interested in running it on modern systems.
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smacktoward
As someone who used to develop on Scoop as part of my day job, I would say:
probably not.

The problem is twofold. First, Scoop doesn't really do anything anymore that
other software can't do as well. Its killer feature was user diaries, which
allowed user-generated content in an age when most systems didn't. But those
days are long past now, so just supporting UGC in a semi-elegant way doesn't
attract people by itself the way it used to in, say, 2004.

Second, as you indicate, it's accrued an absolutely shocking amount of
technical debt, mostly from many years of neglect. This makes switching to
another system less off-putting than it normally would be, since if you stick
with Scoop you're going to be doing as much or more work bringing and keeping
it up to date as you would by making a switch to an alternative product. And
at least if you make a switch you get ongoing support and modern features.

So, anything's possible, but given these two factors I have a feeling that if
someone were going to step forward to save Scoop, they would have done it by
now. The fact that nobody has implies that the audience of people interested
in running it on modern systems is tiny at best.

So if I was still running a site on Scoop, I'd spend my time looking for good
alternatives and planning how to get moved onto one rather than looking around
for someone to bail out a ship that has more or less already sunk.

~~~
orionblastar
If I remember The Daily Kos wrote their own Scoop replacement in Python and
Django or something. But at one time Scoop was very popular.

For example I have a 128M RAM Linux 3.X VPS with Apache2 and run Wordpress on
it with MySQL and always seem to get out of RAM errors with the MySQL
database. Scoop uses Linux 2.X and Apache1 and an old version of Perl but can
run on a 64M Linux 2.X Apache1 VPS and never have out of RAM errors. For some
strange reason this older software Scoop can be used on cheaper VPS hosts,
which is why some people still want to use it.

I've tried Scoop replacements like Wordpress and PHPBB and others, and on a
128M VPS I always get out of RAM errors with MySQL and then I get "Cannot
connect to Database" on my webpages and I am forced to log into SSH and reboot
the VPS to fix it. My host won't increase the RAM for me to 256M even if I pay
more, and I am stuck with 128M and my out of RAM errors.

I knew a few people who ported Scoop to Apache2 and modern Perl, one was named
Ron Paul and ran NetMoneyChat but someone had hacked his server and then he
was trolled and then he killed himself. There was a few others who did that
but none of them ever released the code.

My interest in Scoop is that it has a low RAM profile, all of the modern CMS
software seem to give me out of RAM errors with MySQL with only 128M of RAm on
my VPS. But I cannot run Scoop because it is designed for older systems.

I might just end up writing my own CMS in PHP and make a Scoop or even Hacker
News clone and hope it can run in 128M of RAM without out of memory errors.

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b00biesb00bies
[http://kur.o5h.in/](http://kur.o5h.in/)

