Web Forum Software in Elixir / Phoenix

It was loading for 30 seconds or more before it finally showed a rather spammy Asian forum with a ton of required JS. Am I missing something?

This forum blew my mind) It has an unusual design.

For what it’s worth, there is Zotonic. It isn’t Phoenix, but it is still on the BEAM. I have never used the project though, so I don’t really know which usecases it covers.

They actually have done a recent update to firestorm. Though I’m not sure where the updated Elixir repo is. It looks like they updated the system to be based on GraphQL along with an updated course on SmoothTerminal: https://www.smoothterminal.com/

That’s quite an interesting site. It seems kind of slow on my end but that probably has more to do with the front end and the odd markup.

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Whatever happened to Firestorm?

Here is another forum with GraphQL:

Technically yes, in practice no. Older versions of PHP – those still dominating usage on I’d bet most hosting services on the planet – have a number of well-known security vulnerabilities, not to mention that some of their “frameworks” allow SQL injection to this day.

IMO we need a second wave of commoditization of the web for non-technical users. Not sure there are technical stacks that do this perfectly but Erlang / Elixir are very close – although the BEAM doesn’t support sandboxing and built-in rate-limiting and/or slices of computing resources (that can depend on which user is on which paid plan, for example).

And websites die or get removed from Google’s index every day. That definitely wasn’t sir Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for the web and he said as much many times.

The average website needs to become very lean and mean if we want not to end up with the big 5 corporations hosting all the internet (which many people like myself would work against with all our will and skills… if we had the free time, or were paid for it).

Which brings us to…

That’s very true. I personally I’m unwilling to participate there though. The JS ecosystem is still juvenile at best – the committee cannot even agree on a standard library – and my time is better spent with smart people recognizing where evolution is needed.

In my opinion it has more to do with shared hosting. PHP (and MySQL) have been included with just about every shared hosting plan on the planet and is IMHO the main reason behind the popularity of PHP in general. I used PHP (and still need to) for years to that very reason. It isn’t until you actually need a long running process that you move on to greener pastures, like Python, node.js, and (now for me) Elixir.

There is a project that was started a while back but it hasn’t been updated in a good while: Contento

Wouldn’t that just be retreading ground covered by incumbent solutions already? Seems the current opportunities for innovation are on the client side (web), e.g.:

• Store recent, bookmarked topics and posts for offline viewing
• Queue posts in offline mode for later dispatch when connectivity is available.
• Updating of offline topics with background-fetch
• etc.

Of course that is going to require a server side API that can support that style of distribution.