Show HN: I made a collaborative ASCII editor

[AyyTee]

I made a website for drawing ascii art with other people https://ascii-collab.app/

It's been online for a little over a year so there's a fair bit of stuff to browse if you want to look around (so much that I even made a poster https://ascii-collab.app/poster.png)

There are other websites like yourworldoftext that do this but ascii-collab has some extra features like per-user undo/redo, box selection, a color highlight mode to see who made particular changes, and there's admin tools so I can remove spam.

The code is open sourced here https://github.com/MartinSStewart/ascii-collab if anyone is interested.

Enjoy!

[duck]

Very cool, nice work!

Just to add clickable links for others: https://ascii-collab.app/ https://github.com/MartinSStewart/ascii-collab

[bdr]

Hey, yourworldoftext creator here! It was launched here on HN. Thanks for the mention.

I love what you've done--lots of great features here. Curious to hear more about how you deal with spam. And generally happy to chat/brainstorm anytime.

[AyyTee → bdr]

Hey, thanks for making yourworldoftext! Drawing an ascii town with friends on your site is what inspired me to make this.

In regards to dealing with spam, by far the most effective trick is to get very little traffic (how foolish of me to post my site here!)

The site also saves old changes even if they have been covered up so it's possible for me to remove vandalism and restore what was underneath.

Lastly I have a theory that people are more likely to spam if they see that there's lot of spam already and they are less likely if it looks like everything so far was written with intent. So I try to stay on top of removing spam as soon as it appears.

[cobertos]

I really enjoy being able to hide other users, makes it so easy to uncover things that have been wiped over.

Something had said "I am the admin and I get a notification every time the site updates". It'd be really cool as a user to be able to set a "notification area" for a small spot to keep little ASCII chat collabs/flings open to multiple people.

[AyyTee → cobertos]

That could be a neat feature! It's already possible to get notified of changes via this link https://ascii-collab.app/notify-me but it's for all changes. Before posting to HN this site didn't get much traffic so this was enough but creating a notification area could be a good idea if a lot of people stick around.

[ggeorgovassilis]

Nice! And of course there are already ducks on the front page :) Friendly plug for my own online animated ASCII editor (with animated GIF export!)

https://animasci.com/

[AyyTee → ggeorgovassilis]

Cool site! I tried making something https://animasci.com/play/f7607788-b0a8-4a2c-acb5-81471952d8...

[ggeorgovassilis → AyyTee]

Beautiful :)

[louisstow]

Nice! I've been running a similar ASCII based collab tool called https://walloftext.co

[Minor49er]

These are always fun. This brought back memories of Drawball

[GuestHNUser]

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing the poster image. Curious, how did people find your website before?

[AyyTee → GuestHNUser]

I posted it in a few discord servers and on reddit once so I think that's how the majority of people find it. I haven't made any attempt at SEO so I doubt many people find it on Google.

[RonaldOlzheim]

Can you add me on Linkedin? --> I want to follow the progress.

[AyyTee → RonaldOlzheim]

I'm not active on Linkedin but you can see changes as they are made in the github repo I linked. Or you can subscribe on the ascii-collab site to see what people are drawing.

[ms123]

This is awesome, great work! What inspired you to create it?

[AyyTee → ms123]

Doodling on yourworldoftext while wishing there was an undo button :)

[tacoluv]

this is super cool - and you posted the source code!! btw - with all these contributions, this could make for a really cool art piece/perhaps a book :)

[AyyTee → tacoluv]

Besides the poster, I also made a mug https://ascii-collab.app/mug-front.jpg https://ascii-collab.app/mug-back.jpg and a tshirt (I don't have any photos uploaded of the tshirt though)

[higgins]

Great work! Best fun project I've seen this week.

[KevinOfNeu]

cool!thx.

[_bn1w]

nice!