Live-data demo

[theymos]

There's now a read-only demo of Epochtalk operating on live bitcointalk.org data which you can check out:
https://demo.epochtalk.com

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported, and it's read-only, but over time I'd like this to become an increasingly-useful alternate interface to bitcointalk.org. (Only when it's feature-complete and bug-free would bitcointalk.org switch to Epochtalk.) Already, some people might like to use the demo on mobile devices, where it often works better than the current site. Also, if you look at the requests that the site makes, you can see that it has a JSON API; people who run bots might like to check that out, though we don't officially support/recommend relying on this API yet.

If you see any bugs, use the "Report a bug" link in the top right of the demo.

[Cyrus]

Working on my end, will continue testing in the next days.
As someone who's been testing and helping out with the Epochtalk project since the start I know this is long overdue but also glad that it happened.

Beyond testing and reporting, I already have a use case for the read-only demo in mind and here goes my first feature request:
Bring back/port the theming engine ASAP, having a mobile friendly interface with a dark theme switch in the header (Monokai or a custom one) for on the go browsing the forum would be extra nice and I'm pretty sure lots of users and readers would appreciate it

Edit:
Here's two very recent discussions regarding mobile and dark mode:
Another Forum Mobile Enhancement Userscript
Dark mode on Android

[RickDeckard]

This wasn't on my bingo card for early 2025 for sure, it's great to finally take a peak on the Epochtalk, independently of the current state of it. Thank you for this sneak peek! I'll check it out more in depth in the coming days.

(...) Also, if you look at the requests that the site makes, you can see that it has a JSON API; people who run bots might like to check that out, though we don't officially support/recommend relying on this API yet.

Did I read bots? Calling out the scrapping people that I know of - @LocyceV , @TryNinja. This ought to be the start of something interesting.

[dkbit98]

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported, and it's read-only, but over time I'd like this to become an increasingly-useful alternate interface to bitcointalk.org. (Only when it's feature-complete and bug-free would bitcointalk.org switch to Epochtalk.)

If I understand correctly that means that in future each member would be able to choose between current ''old'' forum theme, and new style we can see on demo.epochtalk.com?

PS
New style looks very clean, I just hope someone thinks about adding dark theme switch, in current state it is to bright white for me.

[suchmoon]

Seems to be much improved since the last time I attempted to "test" it. Still doesn't display signatures correctly though.

Not sure what bugs should really be reported... like not showing the year in the date is terrible UI design but every website and app does that stupid format these days as if 4 extra digits are too expensive to send over the intertubes. User ranks are not shown for some reason but that may be by design as well.

[ibminer]

From my desktop, the thread listings are all shifted to the left and off-center (same with posts inside of a thread)... this will drive me crazy lol. API sounds nice though, definitely need to check that out.

[suchmoon]

Seems to be much improved since the last time I attempted to "test" it.

I have to take that back. It looks better but is about as terrible as it's ever been, full of obvious glitches and bugs that make me think Stevie Wonder was the dev lead. I have reported a handful, but bug reporting is also super annoying, I have to type in my e-mail every time, it requires browser and device, which are irrelevant 99% of the time, and they have autocomplete turned off for some inexplicable reason... come on, make it at least so that I can report 100 bugs in an hour, with the ability to paste a screenshot directly into the form. Or better yet, have the devs look at the site and click a few things, it ain't rocket surgery.

[Catenaccio]

With Tor I get this.

Code:

503
The server is currently down for maintenance or over capacity.
Keep hitting this button or come back later. If the problem persists contact an administrator. 

Without Tor, it works well.

[Cyrus]

If I understand correctly that means that in future each member would be able to choose between current ''old'' forum theme, and new style we can see on demo.epochtalk.com?

Pretty sure the current look and feel will be preserved somehow.
And down the road, Bitcointalk's new APIs could lead the way for all sorts of frontends and interactions. Have a look here: Would you like to access Bitcointalk though a console?

like not showing the year in the date is terrible UI design but every website and app does that stupid format these days as if 4 extra digits are too expensive to send over the intertubes. User ranks are not shown for some reason but that may be by design as well.

I hear you! Feels like most major sites/apps took a step backwards here. Currently in Epochtalk the year is shown if a post is not from the current year.
Personally I think the year should be included and again displayed as a tooltip on hover.

From my desktop, the thread listings are all shifted to the left and off-center (same with posts inside of a thread)... this will drive me crazy lol. API sounds nice though, definitely need to check that out.

The layout needs some adjustments, including stretching the content space IMO there's much screen real estate not being used.
And it looks like it might actually be centered, but to the right there's a space for a sidebar.

[ibminer]

I've hit the 503 error several times, no tor. I can't look at any page of the WO thread, same error. Links off of a profile don't go to the actual post. Clicking on any "quote" off of a profile page gets the 503 also... it feels a little rough.
edit: WO is occasionally loading for me now... maybe it is just overwhelmed with this thread for some reason?  Other threads load much quicker..

The layout needs some adjustments, including stretching the content space IMO there's much screen real estate not being used.
And it looks like it might actually be centered, but to the right there's a space for a sidebar.

The grid seems centered but the thread contents inside seems off
(edit: OK I see the sidebar now )

~

Mobile view looks cleaner though.

one more: edit times for posts are not shown
I'll play around with it more this weekend, running out of time today... I'll stop posting bugs here but the bug report form looks painful at 1 bug per form, maybe some of this is just performance issues, idk.

[Joel_Jantsen]

It looks great! The JSON API really is the game changer for apps that need to be built on top of it. However, I wonder if the long blob of text in the API response is scalable without rendering the pages on the server. Good progress here regardless, I will try to play around with the API endpoints by creating a mini CLI application.

[Cyrus]

(edit: OK I see the sidebar now )

Just visited the WO thread, it loaded albeit slower than other threads. And found the first use case for the sidebar area, it now hosts a floating poll, looks pretty neat.
Bug reporting could be improved.For now, what I'd try to do to speed things up on a PC is to open several tabs with the bug report page, copy paste and alt tab between them to prefill the usual fields and then focus on the actual report.

It looks great! The JSON API really is the game changer for apps that need to be built on top of it. However, I wonder if the long blob of text in the API response is scalable without rendering the pages on the server. Good progress here regardless, I will try to play around with the API endpoints by creating a mini CLI application.

That sounds really cool!

[SFR10]

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported

I just noticed ^{[as a guest]} banners for active flags don't appear on top of the topics that a flagged user has created... Should we expect something new for Epochtalk?

Links off of a profile don't go to the actual post.

This issue appears to be only present for topics with more than a single page and in addition to that, a similar issue exists when you try to click a quote inside of a topic ^{[it always goes to the first post of the thread]}.

e.g.
This is the result of clicking Cyrus's quote from your post:

Code:

https://demo.epochtalk.com/threads/5525469?topic=5525469.msg64929624#msg64929624

One of these links should be the result instead:

Code:

https://demo.epochtalk.com/threads/5525469?start=0#64929624
https://demo.epochtalk.com/threads/5525469?page=1&limit=10#64929624

Clicking on any "quote" off of a profile page gets the 503 also... it feels a little rough.

In my case, it doesn't show any error, but the loading bar gets stuck at around 95% so nothing appears on the screen.

[suchmoon]

Clicking on any "quote" off of a profile page gets the 503 also... it feels a little rough.

In my case, it doesn't show any error, but the loading bar gets stuck at around 95% so nothing appears on the screen.

I was able to 503 the site in a few different ways. Like adding limit=1000 to a big thread.

Edit: somewhat related to async loading issue mentioned below, it seems to show a 503 error if I hit F5 when the page or part of the page is still rendering. I think the 503 error page is wired incorrectly, I don't think an actual server error is happening at that time, it's just client side showing that error page whenever it's not feeling well.

Edit2: recent threads on the front page seem to be reloading on a timer, so if you accidentally hit F5 while it's doing that it will 503 too. I should say that F5 reloads the page anyway so the error is shown only briefly but still weird and annoying.

Edit3: I left a tab open and it did a 503 on its own after a while. I don't recall what page was in it. Unfortunately it redirects to the home page on error so I can't see the original URL and back button doesn't work either.

Edit4: Wall Observer seems to fail sometimes but not always with a 500 error in the API call: https://api.demo.epochtalk.com/api/posts?limit=10&page=1&thread_id=178336
However the UI sometimes throws a 503 error before even getting the API response. Seems like there is a shorter timeout in the UI than the backend, and loading a big thread (even one page of it) sometimes exceeds both.

A few notes that I can't be bothered to report as bugs.

• Breadcrumbs at the top should not be capitalized or truncated. I don't understand what the possible reason for this could be. The last breadcrumb should be a link. Again, no plausible reason for it to not be.
• Same with thread titles of recent threads on the front page. The blobs have a massive top margin and then a truncated thread title. Why? And the recent threads block itself should be collapsible. Not everyone will like it taking up most of the front page.
• No merits on user profile in threads.
• Not a fan of squished and rounded avatars in thread lists etc. They're unreadable/unrecognizable. Just don't show anything.
• Full-size avatars in threads seem to be smaller than on Bitcointalk, causing some to be mangled when scaled down.
• Asynchronous loads should be more obvious, especially because browser rendering is very slow in some cases. You click something, indicator at the top stops spinning and nothing is happening for a while. It should be indicating something until it stops rendering. Ideally blanking out the area of the page it is reloading.
• There is something odd going on with line breaks. Some posts are rendering differently between bitcointalk and epochtalk. I don't have an example right now but I've seen words squished together as if there was a line break missing between them.
• Quotes should be spaced out bit better in posts. I know boxed quotes are "old school" but there was nothing wrong with that, easy to read and understand who said what. If we're not doing boxes then it should have at least some vertical separation.
• Board links don't have board id in them. This could break links if the board name is ever changed.
  e.g. https://demo.epochtalk.com/boards/Development-&-Technical-Discussion
• Unicode mildly broken:
  

And just an illustration on how uncooked the whole thing is in general and why it shouldn't have been made public in this condition. Just opening any random thread you see this:



The user is "user" and... "User". Why?
Default avatar... may be a matter of opinion, but I think it should just show nothing instead.
Missing date in quote - I reported that one.
Mangled signatures mentioned earlier.

That literally takes seconds to notice. Am I the only one seeing it?

And that's before you start clicking on things and quote links are broken, thread sorting is broken, etc. And that's before opening other pages and seeing duplicated username on user profile page, mangled upper/lower case texts etc.

Not sure why theymos is allergic to doing this the right way but this is a waste of time for everyone involved. Users will report the same bugs multiple times. Shit, I may report the same bug multiple times myself because I will forget which ones I already reported and I can't see what I reported. This should be sorted out internally. Then put out a public test when you can't find any bugs to fix anymore in an internal alpha.

Sorry for ranting, I've spent too many years dealing with stuff like that in my day job and it raises my blood pressure

Edit #7573 - error in https://demo.epochtalk.com/threads/5525744?page=3 (only happened once, can't reproduce)



At least the site has a sense of humor:

[theymos]

Note that the demo is temporarily down. This will probably happen from time to time.

[ABCbits]

Note that the demo is temporarily down. This will probably happen from time to time.

No wonder i don't see the board list either using Firefox or Tor. Anyway, i notice the demo homepage keeps making request to https://api.demo.epochtalk.com/api/boards even though it always return "500 Interval Server Error". I may be wrong, but wouldn't it make the server receive more unneeded burden during heavy load?

[shahzadafzal]

There's now a read-only demo of Epochtalk operating on live bitcointalk.org data which you can check out:
https://demo.epochtalk.com

I had to double-check the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.

I couldn’t test it on my laptop because Kaspersky kept blocking it, reporting it as a "Newly Observed Domain."

I’m not sure why, considering that epochtalk.com has been registered since 2014 and demo.epochtalk.com is just a subdomain.

Anyway, I was able to access it via mobile, but oh boy, it was loading so much slower than Bitcointalk. I understand that demo.epochtalk.com might be running on limited resources, so I decided to leave it for now and try accessing it later on my laptop again.

Note that the demo is temporarily down. This will probably happen from time to time.

Will test it again once it up.

[Synchronice]

There's now a read-only demo of Epochtalk operating on live bitcointalk.org data which you can check out:
https://demo.epochtalk.com

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported, and it's read-only, but over time I'd like this to become an increasingly-useful alternate interface to bitcointalk.org. (Only when it's feature-complete and bug-free would bitcointalk.org switch to Epochtalk.) Already, some people might like to use the demo on mobile devices, where it often works better than the current site. Also, if you look at the requests that the site makes, you can see that it has a JSON API; people who run bots might like to check that out, though we don't officially support/recommend relying on this API yet.

If you see any bugs, use the "Report a bug" link in the top right of the demo.

Wow, what do I see? Is this real? This is a real Christmas / New Year gift from you. I swear you really made me happy.
I'll use this opportunity and ask you, have you checked my thread Bitcointalk - Responsive design challenge? If yes, then I'd love to hear your feedback. I think that one of the most important challenge of Bitcointalk is that it's not attractive place for many young people and it's not responsive, you can't get a good experience by browsing Bitcointalk from your smartphone, tablet or any other device.

Do you plan to hire a professional team of web designers to design a user friendly Bitcointalk? Or do you plan to create a bounty and share it with talented Bitcointalk members? What are your plans about the future of Bitcointalk? I don't want to bother you but it's very interesting question for me.

I'll test epochtalk and I'll share my experience.

[theymos]

The demo is up again now.

Wow, what do I see? Is this real? This is a real Christmas / New Year gift from you. I swear you really made me happy.
I'll use this opportunity and ask you, have you checked my thread Bitcointalk - Responsive design challenge? If yes, then I'd love to hear your feedback. I think that one of the most important challenge of Bitcointalk is that it's not attractive place for many young people and it's not responsive, you can't get a good experience by browsing Bitcointalk from your smartphone, tablet or any other device.

It's supposed to be very good on mobile devices. We would appreciate it if a lot of people test it on various devices.

[Synchronice]

The demo is up again now.

Wow, what do I see? Is this real? This is a real Christmas / New Year gift from you. I swear you really made me happy.
I'll use this opportunity and ask you, have you checked my thread Bitcointalk - Responsive design challenge? If yes, then I'd love to hear your feedback. I think that one of the most important challenge of Bitcointalk is that it's not attractive place for many young people and it's not responsive, you can't get a good experience by browsing Bitcointalk from your smartphone, tablet or any other device.

It's supposed to be very good on mobile devices. We would appreciate it if a lot of people test it on various devices.

Do you mean Epochtalk or do you mean the work from my thread? I created this. It works well on smartphones, I tested it via browser's Toggle Device Toolbar and via my smartphone as well. I converted background images into CSS grid, which made them very similar to current images and by converting them to CSS grid, I was able to create a dark version of Bitcointalk. Then I added Toggle button + some javascript and I made it possible to turn on/off dark mode on Bitcointalk.

Epochtalk is good on mobile devices but it's user interface isn't good. It's mostly a typography on a white background (tested on iPhone and Android).