Connections, Trades & Trust

Topic for consideration: adding a feature to establish "connections" between members with an emphasis on "mutual connections"

The most basic version of this would be a friends list and I am sure you have already considered this during development. Alternatives would be following people, liking/rating them, etc. The main reason this would be nice is the ability to identify mutual connections between users. This would help people find connections they can trust using their personal network.

> > BETTER TOPIC for consideration: compare trade history of both parties noting mutual trade partners

I just came up with this while typing this all out so bear with me. So for example, if you go to trade with me, you could see this message:
Ran37 has successfully traded with [name of one of your friends], and [name of someone you traded with], and 3 others in your trade history.



This would help establish another layer of connection/trust in addition to the general trust rating on your profile. I have absolutely no clue if this is difficult to code or not but I figured I'd mention it. Thanks!

Ran37 wrote: 4 years ago

I have absolutely no clue if this is difficult to code or not but I figured I'd mention it.

Hey Ran37, unfortunately what you're suggesting is a huge amount of work. I can't promise you anything on this front, sorry.

Would be ideal as you say to have networking features like this on the site, but beyond phpBB's basic friend list (which is literally just that), I'd have to build things up from scratch which is just too much to justify at the moment.

Gotcha, I was sure you had considered things like this but I wanted to speak up just in case. Thanks for all the hard work! I wish I knew coding so I could help.

@Teebling is everything phpBB based? I really really really really hate PHP, but I would love for this site to succeed so I'd be happy to help if you want.

klh wrote: 4 years ago

@Teebling is everything phpBB based? I really really really really hate PHP, but I would love for this site to succeed so I'd be happy to help if you want.

phpBB is the main backend engine behind the actual entries, but it is heavily modified with extensions and my own custom code. It powers most of the site, yes, where jQuery doesn't do so on the frontend.

Why do you hate PHP?

Mostly because since it's conception much better options came along. But specifically: poor developer experience (last time I used it there was no cohesion in function naming, duplicate functions, functions that had misleading names), iffy decisions by the creator (who said on a few occasions he hates programming), weird error handling and bad performance compared to almost anything else because it's interpreted.

I hear frameworks solve most of it now, but I didn't have a reason to go back given the alternatives ;p

klh wrote: 4 years ago

I hear frameworks solve most of it now, but I didn't have a reason to go back given the alternatives ;p

Well see that's the great strength of PHP. Whilst it might not be cutting Edge technology and considered 'legacy' by most new school programmers, it's used by over 50% of websites on the internet for a very good reason - the availability of a great variety of frameworks, libraries and other extensions that just make it able to do pretty much anything you could possibly want.

Point out to me one modern web language that can do that, and is as easy to learn and versatile as PHP, and I'd hop on board. Until then, I'm going to stick to my guns

I've been coding for the last 20 years, I'm definitely not "new school"

Definitely didn't want to convert you to something else, I understand why people choose PHP. To be fair most of the 50% you mention are people running Wordpress et al., who don't touch the code.

If you really want to try something else, for ease of use and versatility I'd recommend Ruby on Rails (coincidentally my forum software of choice Discourse is written in Ruby). I'm personally in love with Rust, but that's definitely not "easy to learn" ;p

Anyway, I'm not allergic to PHP, my offer still stands - the initial question was in hope that there is some microservice stuff going on.

@Ran37 Luckily I find that with forums such as this, you quickly learn to identify people who regular the site. So while it definitely would be nice with friends list, there is the old school charm of recoqnizing people

klh wrote: 4 years ago

If you really want to try something else, for ease of use and versatility I'd recommend

Ruby on Rails (coincidentally my forum software of choice Discourse is written in

Ruby).

I've dabbled in RoR and Discourse. Discourse is pretty and all but it just falls way short when it comes to extendability and didn't fit the needs of d2io here, so I decided not to use it. I also looked at JS solutions like Flarum etc. as well, but the same issue remained where even basic stuff expected on a forum was still in beta, or hadn't been developed at all.

klh wrote: 4 years ago

Anyway, I'm not allergic to PHP, my offer still stands - the initial question was in hope that there is some microservice stuff going on.

What do you mean by microservice? I'm an amateur coder so some of the terminology escapes me sometimes!

Teebling wrote: 4 years ago

Discourse is pretty and all but it just falls way short when it comes to extendability

I have the opposite experience

Teebling wrote: 4 years ago

What do you mean by microservice? I'm an amateur coder so some of the terminology escapes me sometimes!

It's where you separate your app into multiple smaller programs, each doing it's own thing, usually running in containers (docker + kubernetes for example). Makes it easy to mix and match languages and one of the big advantages is you can scale different parts of the system independently - for example if you see the trading service is getting a lot of usage you can spin up another instance of it and leave the rest as is (usually handled automatically of course).

@Tavron great point - especially over long term