Wall of Text

Learning and science

websocket demo

SHOW HN2021

Wall of Text

I learnt how to use WebSockets, made something beautiful/terrible

walloftext.art

#websockets#anonymous comments#php websocket#realtime grid

145points
60comments
#344of 2,533 in 2021
Top 14%of 2021 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

4 positive, 18 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 4 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score +0.02.

Execution: 0 for, 3 againstIdea: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Fun and nostalgic concept, similar to early Facebook wall

    From 1 comment
    • My first thought was "vintage Facebook" actually — back when it was called _the_ Facebook and open only to university students. The wall was a beautifully chaotic thing,…
      neoncontrails on HN
  • Code is succinct and instructive

    From 1 comment
    • Seeing the URL end in .php gave me the wrong impression - I thought it was running a separate PHP interpreter for each connection... which is naturally insane, and why I was…
      exikyut on HN

Objections

  • Site was abused with slurs and illegal content and taken offline

    From 2 comments
    • From the site: > I've had to take this project offline! > I was expecting it to be abused and violated, but was completely naive to what the internet people were capable of. >…
      squarefoot on HN
    • Illegal content uploaded via my naive websocket implementation. I thought it was best to turn it off than fix while it was "hot".
      g105b on HN
  • Insecure implementation accepted arbitrary input and rendered HTML

    From 2 comments
    • let me see. I open a page and text that other people enter in real time is rendered as html on that page? what could possibly go wrong.
      jvanderbot on HN
    • hey, with web sockets I am a noob. I'm generally quite ok with internet security as a concept, but I was massively naive in my implementation here, and one very obvious…
      g105b on HN

Requests

  • Add accounts or limit access to real users

    From 1 comment
    • Seeing the URL end in .php gave me the wrong impression - I thought it was running a separate PHP interpreter for each connection... which is naturally insane, and why I was…
      exikyut on HN
  • Bring the site back online

    From 2 comments
    • Seeing the URL end in .php gave me the wrong impression - I thought it was running a separate PHP interpreter for each connection... which is naturally insane, and why I was…
      exikyut on HN
    • Ok, fair enough :)
      Aeolun on HN

Questions

  • What was the site like before it was taken down?

    From 2 comments
    • Anyone who saw what it was before it was taken down (which is just what I saw when I opened it now for the first time), what exactly was it?
      can16358p on HN
    • Also curious. I thought the last thing up would be a screenshot.
      joshspankit on HN
  • Why was it taken down and what illegal content was posted?

    From 2 comments

Alternatives named

  • yourworldoftext.com

    From 2 comments
    • Is this perchance inspired by https://www.yourworldoftext.com/? I remember reading an interesting technical writeup when that went out -- it was early days for websocket. It…
      sanqui on HN
    • This looks similar to yourworldoftext[0] that was posted a few weeks ago. Very cool. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576394
      pjot on HN
  • 300 Lines shared canvas

    From 1 comment
    • I worked on a similar little project about 10 years ago. We called it 300 Lines. It was a shared public canvas which displayed only the last 300 lines drawn. We used socket.io to…
      mikehall314 on HN
  • gorilla/websocket chat example

    From 1 comment
    • While I didn't get to see what the site originally looked like. If it was just 'submit anonymous comments that websocket subscribers can see', there's a golang example leveraging…
      scrose on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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