It might be a good idea to have an info page that explains what's going on (I'm presuming my ability to see files is based on other peoples' browsers being open?).
Also, I really like the design as it is right now. Don't feel pressured to change it all that much - keep it HN-esque. :)
A textarea would be cool though. With CTRL+Enter. :P
Oh and an API!
And an authentication system that uses say Google's one-click captcha engine for passersby and a highly convoluted auth system no spammer would want to put up with so bots and clients and Real Users(TM) can connect! (Like "please DCC SEND a base64-challenge-response-encoded public key to this random IRC user on blahblah private network using this IP address with this one-time password...")
I really appreciate the advice. It says connecting until the server has facilitated a connection between you and a peer if no peers are online it will say connection for ever. There is an api available. HTTPS://github.com/flynnbo/hookmeup. Will connect you to other peers. I will implement the recaptcha to prevent spam. And maybe setup a bot to always be available. Thanks once again.
I just fired it back up to have another look, and I thought of a couple more ideas:
- If it's not too hard, maintain a live-updated index of how many peers are available for each file on the file listing page (and extend the API so it returns this data too). That way I won't be sitting waiting forever because I can't tell the difference between a backend outage and peer unavailability for a given file, which is currently the case.
- While writing the above idea I thought of this: maybe, at least to begin with, it might be useful to use a "store'n'forward" type model with the system, where you say "I'm interested in <this> and <this> file", then once the files download, the site uses desktop notifications to update you. (I imagine your API works push-style, so API clients would probably behave similarly to this by design as well.)
- Categories of some kind might be a good idea at some point. If you do implement these, I think everyone would appreciate if it worked like IRC's /list command - a giant "here's the whole thing" dump, somewhere. Nobody really knows the full list of subreddits, and on Medium.com there's no public list of categories at all.
- Sometime wayyyy down the track... it would be epically awesome if you could allow people to have the option to put OTR under their posts. There are JavaScript implementations, FWIW, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to form a cryptographically secure AND anonymous link using OTR... if it is, a lot of people would love it.
- At the moment when you click a file it opens in a new tab. That means a new WebSocket connection for each file. It would both be nicer UX and lighter on the server if you open files in the same window, methinks.
- I unfortunately haven't seen what happens when you open a file, but if it doesn't exist yet, having a "6 other peers agree on file content" message in the corner of the post view would be a cool idea.
[Staring at "connecting...."] Yeah, you definitely need to update the file list so it shows peer counts for files. :P
Maybe you could add some "last-resort" code to the backend that hands you the file if there are no other peers, along with a "warning: this file is not being delivered using a peer" type message (in red :D)?
I just thought to check HN again ([mumbles something about notifications]), glad I did. I just opened all the files that are there; Readme.txt has now loaded, and I commented! :D
And I was thinking something like this for the file listing (look to the right of the filenames): http://i.imgur.com/kC2Dzex.png
But you've implemented the general gist of what I meant perfectly. :D
Once again thanks for all the feedback this really is astonishing. I will consider implementing that suggestion but i usually conform to the KISS principle and it would complicate the protocol if i was to add that ability. Categories is definitely a must have though. I will get started on that now. You can use this service to notify of responces on HN http://hnnotify.com/. :)
My inspiration for memesfortheparanoid came from the following blog post https://medium.com/@ryanxcharles/fix-reddit-with-bitcoin-7da.... However my implementation does not involve bitcoin. Uses Webrtc datachannels to create p2p connections. It uses a merkle-dag similar to the blockchain to store a log of all data. To submit a post simply drag and drop a txt file containing a few wise words. It will be replicated amongst your peers and their peers until it propagates through the entire network. All data is saved to indexeddb so when you return to the page you will make the data available to other peers. I only developed in the last couple of weeks so very buggy and unattractive. Cheers,
The root page (/) showed "peers: 2" for a while now, now it says "peers: 1".
I see a list of two files, both just do
It might be a good idea to have an info page that explains what's going on (I'm presuming my ability to see files is based on other peoples' browsers being open?).Also, I really like the design as it is right now. Don't feel pressured to change it all that much - keep it HN-esque. :)
A textarea would be cool though. With CTRL+Enter. :P
Oh and an API!
And an authentication system that uses say Google's one-click captcha engine for passersby and a highly convoluted auth system no spammer would want to put up with so bots and clients and Real Users(TM) can connect! (Like "please DCC SEND a base64-challenge-response-encoded public key to this random IRC user on blahblah private network using this IP address with this one-time password...")