Into The Forrst

On what’s next.

I’m really, really excited to be writing this post today. Big things are afoot at Forrst, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.

I am pleased to announce that Forrst is part of the latest 500startups Accelerator batch. Dave participated in our seed round in March, and when he asked us to come out to Mountain View this October, it was quite simply an offer we couldn’t refuse. I’ll post more thoughts later on how great 500 has been for us thus far, suffice to say we had a pretty decent month* this month, the partners & founder/mentor network are amazing, and things are only going to get better from here. It’s also great to be around a bunch of companies doing some pretty neat things in the industry. There is something invigorating about sharing an office (and what an office, indeed) with tons of smart folks.

Our goals while we’re out here are simple: kicking ass on product, growing the Forrst community in a meaningful way, and ramping up revenue. On the revenue side, we’re focusing on moving our primary revenue source from an internal one (the community paying for X) to an external one (people paying for access/exposure to the community). The most direct path to that thus far has been the launch of our new jobs platform, which I cover a bit below. All in all, it’s been a fantastic start, and I’m immensely looking forward to the next few months.

We also officially launched our jobs platform around a week ago. (PS - We can help you hire.) While it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m eager to continue iterating on what we’ve got planned, and the response so far has been simply fantastic. There are already a ton of rad companies like Meetup, Tumblr, LaunchRock, Storenvy, AppFog, blip.tv, A9.com, Visual.ly, Assistly, and more participating, and many are already having success connecting with great developers and designers from Forrst.

While it may look like “just another job board” on the surface, a Forrst account is needed to apply, and because of that we’re able to provide much more context around who’s applying, including a sampling of their public content, Forrst reputation, photo, and so forth. To date, most of the listings have been for fulltime positions, but we’re also playing around with an experiment called Tinyproj that aims to connect our users with great freelance work. I expect big things to happen on both of these fronts. Everything we do has to answer a basic question: “is this great for the community?”. We can answer a resounding “yes” here (who doesn’t love getting paid to work on awesome stuff?), and it feels good to be able to focus on helping our community in even more ways.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the overall vision for Forrst. It’s become increasingly clear that we’re in a really great spot to become the place where up and coming (and presently un/under-known) talent is discovered and hired. We’ve made a big push over the last six months to focus on high quality, thoughtful feedback around development and design projects, and there are some more fundamental product changes in store (all good things, I promise!) that should help to further focus the community around this vision.

There’s something incredibly powerful about being able to learn about how someone works, not just what they can produce. It’s also amazing to watch talented folks paying it forward and helping nurture budding talent; we were all starting out once, and I believe this is one of the best parts about the Forrst community.

So, over the next couple months we’ll be rolling out product updates that aim to make Forrst much simpler, faster, and focused — all keeping in mind the vision we’ve got for what the community can become (and quite frankly, already is in many ways!).

Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the people — our team, friends, colleagues, investors, mentors, and advisors — who’ve believed in and helped grow and build Forrst over the two years that we’ve been around (they know who they are), and I’m honored to have so many people rooting for us.

By the way, that “decent month” I mentioned earlier? We are profitable.

Onward!

Kyle Bragger, Founder

@kylebragger

Fenced code blocks, heck yeah!

We finally rolled out fenced code block support on Forrst. Gone will be the days of messy, incorrectly formatted code in your posts and comments. To add code, just wrap it in three or more tildes (~~~) like so:

~~~
your code
goes here

you don't have to indent it!
hooray!
~~~

Enjoy!

— Kyle

Stats!

Everybody likes stats, so here are some neat/awesome/boring stats about Forrst.

Since launching about 14 months ago:

• 31,000 registered users, 40% of whom are active each month (and that’s more than just logging in)
• nearly 90,000 posts across four types (code, screenshots, links, and questions)
• 350,000 comments
• 17,000 folks waiting for an account (something we’re working on reducing, e.g. with GitHub-powered signup)
• almost 1 million pieces of content liked
• between 50 and 100 people request an invite every day
• 640 paid accounts
• we grew by 1,200 users in January 2011; we grew by 2,700 users in June 2011

It’s been awesome to see Forrst grow from literally nothing into the awesome community it is today, and we’re all seriously excited about what’s next for us.

New Moderation Tools

Part of what makes Forrst unique is its highly focused set of Guidelines — we feel that without focus, Forrst would devolve into not-so-great a place. I’m pleased to report that we’ve just rolled out a new set of tools that aim to make moderation more streamlined for all parties involved.

If your post is flagged for a valid reason*, we’ll immediately unpublish it and leave a note describing what’s going on and how you can resolve it. You’ll be notified via email of this note (so make sure your email address is up to date), and the note will also appear (only to you) at the top of the post page. When you’ve made the changes/taken the actions needed, just hit the “My post has been updated…” button to let us know. We’ll take it from there.

Congrats to Zack and Mike for a job well done.

* if someone egregiously flags your post, we’ll simply clear it out. No harm done.

On the Forrst invite system.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched a substantial update to Forrst’s invite system.

We’ve employed an invite-only model since the early days of the site with a nice degree of success; it’s helped keep the community highly-focused, and ensured that only developers and designers are able to gain access. It’s also helped maintain our growth at a healthy rate.

Something we haven’t handled so well, however, has been our constantly growing waiting list — now over 13,000 strong. Folks who should be in the community have been subjected to increasingly unreasonable waits — sometimes up to a few months. We think that sucks, so to that end, we’ve re-imagined the way invites work on Forrst.

The new system

The new system is based on votes. Everyone starts the day with 5 votes, and may use those votes to say “I think this person should be invited”. You’re essentially vouching for them as a developer or designer. Once the prospective user receives 2 votes (a number we may tweak as we watch usage), they’ll receive an invite.

This is a major departure from the way invites currently work, where users’ reputations are linked to that of the users they invite. We felt that the accountability we were enforcing tended to be a bit overreaching, causing most users to feel uneasy about using their invites on strangers. With the new system, we’re spreading out the responsibility to multiple members.

Of course, you’ll still be able to instantly invite colleagues and friends via email, and that system has not changed — invites are still earned through awesome interaction with the community and maintaining a reputation in the 92nd percentile or higher.

Another thing you’ll notice is that we’ve stopped confusingly referencing requesting an invite as “applying”. To us, inviting new users should be entirely based on their passion for development and design, and not how talented or known they are in their respective industries. Forrst is a great place for getting honest critique and feedback, and any legitimate developer or designer is welcome to join; keeping this in mind when voting for new users is important to the process.

Speaking of critique, there’s an important new element to the invite request: feedback. When you request an invitation, you’re given the opportunity to leave feedback on one of our member’s posts; we think this is a great way to show the community that you’re ready, willing, and able to add to the discussions happening on Forrst. When you do receive your invitation to join, your feedback will be automatically added to that user’s post. We’re really excited about this new twist and we think our community will be, too.

If you’re ready to start voting on users, head on over here: http://forrst.com/people/list/invite/ (or access this page from People > Invite New Members at any time). We’re converting over many of the 13,000 existing requests, so bear with us as you may not see that many requests over the next 24 hours.

If you’ve recently requested an invite, we’ll be sending out an email with instructions on updating your request. Please expect it shortly (hopefully in the next 24-48 hours).

The Leaderboard

As part of this new system, we’ve also launched the Forrst Leaderboard. It’s intended to be an up-to-date snapshot of which members have been the most engaged and helpful within Forrst. While your reputation plays a very tiny part in your ranking, the majority of your ranking comes from having your comments starred by Forrst staff or marked helpful by other users; you’ll also get credit for inviting in new users who also start contributing to the community. This marks the first of many initiatives at Forrst to help reward our members for their helpfulness and incredible contributions, both to the community and each other.

One more thing

While I have your attention (hopefully!), there’s one more tiny* thing I’d like to announce: we’ve also launched Notifications. Gone will be the days of Forrst email overload — there’s now a notifications page that alerts you to new comments on your posts or posts you’ve subscribed to, new follows, and any mention of your username within posts and comments (we’ve got more notification events coming shortly). Check it out for yourself: http://forrst.com/feed — Note that it’s only collecting data from now going forward, so it may be a few moments before you start seeing alerts. As part of this feature, you’ll see an unviewed notification count next to the Forrst logo and in the page title, so you’ll have almost instant notification anytime there’s something new to check out.

* Okay, maybe not so tiny

That’s all folks.

I’m really excited about the things we’ve released today, and incredibly proud of Keith, Zack, and Mike for their hard work in getting this stuff looking and working solidly. I’m also really looking forward to what’s in store over the next year. We’re definitely just getting started.

If you’ve got any questions or feedback at all, please don’t hesitate to contact hello AT forrst.com.

Cheers,
Kyle Bragger
Founder

Update on Snaps

Late Friday evening we had to disable the ability to post new Snaps, due to high error rates when pushing to Amazon S3. While we work through this issue, there is a work around. 

If you can upload your snaps to your own hosting provider, you can embed them in ‘Question’ or ‘Link’ type posts. You can then reference your image in the post description using either Markdown, or HTML. 

The Markdown Syntax is:

![Alt Text](http://host.com/img.jpg)

Thank you for being patient while we work through this issue. 

Zack Kitzmiller

Regarding Reputation Decay

We recently made some changes to the way the reputation points decay on Forrst, and a lot of you have obviously noticed. The short of it is, every day, you lose all points that are over thirty days old. Everyone Does.

What this does is level the playing field for everyone, and encourages constant activity from you to keep your reputation up. (Foursquare recently did the same thing with mayorships). 

Your old points always decayed, but at a much slower rate. So slow in fact, that it would take the old algorithm two weeks to process the number of Reputation Actions that happened on any given day. There was no way for the processing to ever catch up.

So, the reason that we made this drastic decision to cut out your old points completely, is because several of the “top 20” users were so far ahead of others no one could catch up, and some of these “top 20” users had been inactive for weeks. 

So, while it looks like your points are just falling off, so are everyone else’s, and the change of your actual reputation percentile (which is what we care about internally) should be more representative of your actual activity on the site. 

If you have any questions about these changes, or anything else regarding engineering at Forrst, feel free to email zack at forrst dot com

-Zack Kitzmiller

Downtime Post-Mortem (03-26-2011)

On 3/26/11 Forrst went down from around 7:00pm CST and stayed down until around 9:45pm CST. It appears that somewhere around 7:00pm last night our Redis server became unavailable to our front-end server for around 45 seconds. We’re still investigating the cause for why Redis went away, but for whatever reason, it was gone. 

In most normal situations, you would have all seen the Error Bear for about 45 seconds, and things would have gone back to normal, but instead the white screen of death was showing. This happened because Redis went away in the middle of a request (this person most likely saw the Error Bear). This caused PHP to shutdown incorrectly and not call our custom shutdown handler, which we believe left a file pointer to one of our log files open. 

This was causing our PHP framework (Magnus) to die during startup because it couldn’t write to the log file that had an open file pointer. It was a simple oversight on our part to not check to see if our log file was writeable (which we have now remedied). 

The reason it took us almost 3 hours to diagnose this problem was because we initially believed it to be a networking issue between servers, as that had happened to us early in the year, and we started triaging based on that (now incorrect) assumption.

So, going forward: We’ve fixed the issue where Magnus isn’t able to write to log files with bad/wrong permissions, and are going to reduce the memory footprint that Redis is using (probable cause of the crash). 

We’re extremely sorry for the downtime and have worked to ensure that this issue won’t occur again.

TL;DR Redis crashed for a few seconds, our PHP framework couldn’t write log files, and was dying during bootstrapping causing the white screen of death. 

-Zack Kitzmiller

Forrst Architechure Redux

I wanted to take a few minutes at write an update to the Forrst Architechure (http://blog.forrst.com/post/616614116/on-forrsts-architecture). Lots of people reference that post, it’s almost a year old, and lots of things change in a year.

First, the basics. Forrst is still a PHP (5.2+) app, however, it is no longer written in CodeIgniter. We (read: Kyle) wrote a rad new PHP MVC framework called Magnus. Magnus is a very light weight framework that was written and designed for Forrst, but we do plan to release it at some point in the future. 

We are still using MySQL for the primary datastore. We store pretty much all mission critical information in MySQL. We’ve scrapped MongoDB, but we still are using Redis2.2.1 for caching expensive MySQL queries such as counts. We also use Redis for handling all of our sessions. 

The new Forrst Talk feature is powered by the absolutely amazing Pusher with web sockets, and we plan on using Pusher for lots more exciting new stuff as time rolls on. 

Pretty much everything from the original blog post is still accurate. If you have any more questions on the Forrst architecture, please feel free to email either zack at forrst dot com, or kyle at forrst dot com.

-Zack