Sorry if I'm hijacking the discussion. Also sorry if i am asking too many questions.
I am also working on creating a discussion forum based on arc news. I have programming and web development experience but none with arc or list-like languages. I saw hubski's site and liked it a lot. I have some specific questions:
- like the OP asked, how difficult would it be to add open-id, facebook, twitter, g+ integration?
- how does hubski distinguish text submissions vs videos and so on? How do I group/categorize all of them?
- how do I add tags to submissions or allow admins to add tags?
- how do i decrease the karma required to downvote?
- how do i mimic HN's job page, ie: no name of the poster and no comment field- just link and text. How to group all such posts?
Hi darjeeling. I run http://hubski.com Glad you like it! Unfortunately, I don't think there are any quick answers to your questions. Most of this requires writing new code. I'll take a shot at them, to get you started, however:
how difficult would it be to add open-id, facebook, twitter, g+ integration?
That depends on how integrated you want to get. It's fairly trivial to be able to add a 'like' or '+1' button, but if you want deeper integration, you'd have to be specific about what you want to do. I haven't tried open-id. I'm sure it's doable.
how does hubski distinguish text submissions vs videos and so on? How do I group/categorize all of them?
For videos, it is a matter of identifying the url as a video url, etc. For example with findsubseq, you can pick out if contains "youtube" "youtu.be", etc. Text submissions are those that lack a url, and don't have an empty text field, etc. No quick fix here. news.arc wasn't made to sort them that way, I had to do that.
how do I add tags to submissions or allow admins to add tags?
There are a number of ways you might go about that. I added the tag as an additional story key/value pair. Depending on your tagging structure, you might want to make each tag it's own template, containing the ids of stories carrying that tag.
how do i decrease the karma required to downvote?
I think there is downvote-threshold* in news.arc, -just change the value. I don't use karma or downvotes with Hubski. So I don't have that code anymore. :)
how do i mimic HN's job page, ie: no name of the poster and no comment field- just link and text. How to group all such posts?
Shouldn't be too difficult. Each story could have a 'job' key with a value of nil or t. If it is t, then opt not to show the comment tree, name, etc.
From the range of your questions, it seems that you haven't messed with the code too much yet. If you really want to use news.arc, just get in there and start tweaking. I was totally green to Arc when I started. Good luck!
Hi Markkat, thank you very much for your detailed reply. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask more questions.
- If I want to start hacking into the news code, is news.arc the only file I start with? I would also like to change the css, make email field compulsory, send email confirmation and so on. If you could show me some direction, it would be very helpful.
- by integration with other services, I mean allowing likes, +1, commenting, log-in etc. I think I will have to look into the code to start understanding this more, so it is related to the above point.
- about identifying video URLs- how would you recommend expanding something like, say a bit.ly link?
- Yes, I haven't done anything with the code yet because it looks a little unfamiliar at this point. But I'd love to.
