Into The Forrst

On what's next.

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:50:00 -0400

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!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:01:00 -0400

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!

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:56:44 -0400

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

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:44:00 -0400

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.

Acorn pricing has been updated.

Mon, 09 May 2011 14:10:26 -0400

Acorn pricing has been updated.:

We’ve just pushed a significant update to Acorn pricing:

Acorns are now $1 apiece, down from $5.
There’s a minimum purchase of $5 required when buying (mostly to help defray PayPal fees on low transaction amounts)
We’ve adjusted the amount of impressions they buy accordingly — Acorns are now worth 100 impressions each.
Supporters will still get up to $20 in Acorns each month, which equates to up to 20.
This means attachments are now $1 each for normal users (Supporters get unlimited attachments for free)
Finally, every 10 Acorns you purchase earns you one free.

We’ve already updated your existing Acorn counts appropriately (e.g. if you had 1 before you now have 5).

We hope this helps alleviate some of the concern around attachment pricing, as well as offers more flexibility when buying Acorns to promote posts.

On the Forrst invite system.

Mon, 02 May 2011 15:57:33 -0400

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

Sun, 01 May 2011 09:51:00 -0400

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

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:57:37 -0400

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)

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:17:00 -0400

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

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:18:03 -0500

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

A quick note about Promoted Posts.

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:51:48 -0500

When we launched Promoted Posts back in December, we had no idea they’d become so popular so quickly. (Un)fortunately, that put us in an interesting position where the initial system we’d built quickly became inundated with posts — a good problem to have, certainly, but not necessarily for our users. We’ve been working extremely diligently over the past few weeks to re-architect the system to much better handle the amount of posts coming through. To that end, we’ve temporarily disabled promoting new posts — existing posts will still run normally.

The new system works a bit differently: you purchase Acorns and hit “Promote” as usual, but now your post will enter a queue. It’s designed to ensure that only a limited amount of posts run at any given time, and as one post drops out of rotation, a new post takes its place. We’ll soon have enough data to show you exactly where you are in the queue, and when you can expect your post to go live. It’s a first in, first out kind of system.

So, for now, we need to focus on clearing the existing queue before we enable promoting new posts again. When the new system is ready, we’ll turn promotion back on. There will also be a way to “double down” to jump the line — for extra Acorns, you’ll be able to move your post to the front; great for posts that are time-sensitive.

I’ll also be crediting all users whose posts are in the backlog with Acorns commensurate with the amount they initially purchased. I realize that it’s a small show of our apologies, and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

I’m really excited about the new system and I hope to have it fully deployed soon.

Thank you, Kyle

On our recent changes to the Forrst Guidelines.

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:57:47 -0500

Howdy, folks. As of this morning, there are a few notable changes to the Forrst Guidelines I wanted to mention briefly.

Be proud of your posts. Please don’t post just for the sake of posting, or post things like “I was bored, LOL”. When commenting, try to say more than just “Great” or “Hate it”; the more thorough your feedback, the more reputation you’ll earn.

We clarified this guideline quite a bit, specifically in terms of one of the reasons why folks should provide thorough feedback.

Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at. Also, teaser posts are fine, but photos of your screen or extreme crops are better posted elsewhere.

We added the bolded part — while it’s always fun to hint at that next big project you’re working on, we’d like to steer clear of the Forrst ecosystem becoming one too cluttered with low-context teaser shots and photos of screens.

Your posts and comments should be written with proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. In general, try to write things on Forrst as you’d write things to your clients or your employer.

This one’s brand new — Forrst is a community of both professional developers and designers, as well as up-and-coming talent. We previously didn’t mention anything about post and comment formatting, but the community has grown to the point where we’ve been seeing more than a few instances of posts or comments with good intent but poor formatting. We know not everyone’s the greatest writer (ourselves included), but we do feel that Forrst content can and should be on par with how you’d write a client or employer — properly formatted, no txt speak, and so forth.

We also updated the list of posts that probably aren’t a good fit for Forrst:

iOS homescreens and mods, work- and deskspaces, desktops, or desktop wallpaper

Desktop wallpaper and iOS mods, while certainly interesting, have tended to lead to terse posts without much detail behind the work. We also feel that there are better communities devoted more to customization, e.g. DeviantArt (of which we’re a big fan).

All in all, I’m really proud of how the Forrst community has continued to evolve and grow, and I feel our guidelines have played an important role in that. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read the new guidelines, as well as our brief summary of changes above. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly: kyle at forrst.com.

Thanks,
Kyle

Forrst: One Year Later

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:10:00 -0500

I thought it would be fun to do a quick post in honor of Forrst recently having its first birthday. Coincidentally, our birthday falls in January, which means I can be exceptionally lazy and combine “happy birthday to us” and “year in review” posts into one.

Now, without further ado, here it is.

Some interesting numbers since going online in January 2010, one year ago:

1,795,891 unique visitors came to Forrst
10,440,376 pages have been viewed
users have spent the equivalent of 22.881 years on the site
we grew to 21,024 registered users
of those users, in a given month around 7,500 create content (that’s almost 36%!)
there are 51,889 posts, with 411,651 likes and 182,090 comments
at any given time, roughly 10,000 people are waiting for an invitation (we need to help get them in a bit faster; some have been waiting for months)
any given day, users generate around 7,000 unique pieces of activity data
there are between 250 and 400 users using Forrst at any given time

What a year it’s been! I had no idea that what started out as a tiny side project would evolve into a vibrant community. Other notables for 2010, and some of what’s in store for 2011:

Gary Vaynerchuk invested a seed round in March and Forrst officially became a full-time project for me
we decided to raise a small angel round, and Dave McClure joined as an investor in late December (NB: the round isn’t fully subscribed yet)
Forrst gained its first two employees, Zack and Mike (both Forrst users)
we launched The Cabin, a weekly deal feature
we went through three major iterations of our UI and site architecture
we were written about or mentioned multiple times in Observer, Smashing Magazine, Think Vitamin, Mashable, Techcrunch, SEOmoz, and many other blogs
we launched Promoted Posts and on-site credits, Acorns
finally, we worked with the excellent Pasquale and Adam

Coming in 2011:

We launched Forrst.me into beta
We have been invited to work out of Dogpatch Labs NYC (Thanks Peter, Matt, and crew!)
The Cabin relaunched in partnership with AppSumo
We’re rolling out a job board powered by Behance’s job network
We announced Supporter accounts, and started accepting pre-registrations — over 500 members signed up in less than 24 hours

There’s a bunch more we’ve got in store for the product this year, including welcoming a designer to the team, helping members more easily collaborate, building a better notifications system, more partnerships, and so much more. There are also plans to really start exploring the ways Forrst can become a powerful business, through the job and recruitment avenues, our Supporter accounts, and so forth.

I realize that this post doesn’t fully do Forrst justice since so many incredible things came to pass last year that are difficult to properly convey, but I hope it provides a glimpse into the amazing journey I and the community have had. Thanks so much.

Hooray! Thanks to the wonderful guidance of @abraham,...

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:24:54 -0500

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Hooray! Thanks to the wonderful guidance of @abraham, @kylebragger built out an OAuth2 server for Forrst in anticipation of our upcoming API.

On Reputation.

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:56:15 -0500

There has been some chatter around Forrst and IRC lately about reputation, so we thought we’d take a moment to write up exactly what reputation “is.”

The reputation system is in place to ensure the Forrst is filled with quality content. Just about every action that you do on Forrst in someway contributes to your reputation score. However, you are not the only one that can affect your reputation score, which should explain why your score can change over night and in periods of inactivity. And remember, every action you do also affects the person who invited you.

Thought out comments are encouraged, and un-constructive comments are discouraged. Other than that, don’t worry too much about reputation, and just be an active and constructive member. It’s more a way for us to watch and reward great contributors than it is any kind of competition.

We’ve designed the system from the ground up to help prevent users trying to game the system, and several checks are in place to ensure that things like just liking every post that you come across won’t give you an unfair advantage.

Currently, invites are handed out based on your reputation (thought we realize we may need to tweak the balance a bit), and we have several other things in the works that are going to require various reputation scores.

Feel free to email zack at forrst.com if you feel that there is an error or bug in the system, or with any other thoughts or concerns, and I will try to shed some light on the situation.

Forrst v3, one week later.

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 11:14:09 -0500

Hard to believe that Forrst v3 launched a mere seven days ago. We’re extremely proud of the product and community we’ve built, and wanted to share a few updates since launch.

Fixes and Support

We’ve rolled out literally dozens of bugfixes and subtle tweaks since launch. You should rarely, if ever, come across our dear friend, Error Bear, but if you do, rest assured we’ll fix it in short order. By popular demand, we brought back a unified popular posts feed. Also, we know our Uservoice isn’t getting the attention it deserves, and we’re currently looking at ways to roll a support system into Forrst in a more integrated fashion, since many folks are sharing their support issues directly on the site. Ultimately, we’d love to figure out a way to leverage the site and community for such issues.

Promoted Posts

We’ve been amazed at the positive response to our new Promoted Posts system and our site credits, Acorns. To date, we’ve already seen dozens of awesome promoted posts, with some great response. The guys at Skills wrote a neat blog post about their experience so far. If you’re interested in reading more, check out the FAQ or head over to snag a few Acorns and give it a shot for yourself.

Introducing Reputation

Zack has been working extremely hard implementing a very robust reputation system for Forrst. While young, we feel that it’s already an excellent way to see who’s going above and beyond contributing to the community. Every single action you take on Forrst contributes to your reputation score (either positively or negatively). This includes, posting, liking posts and comments, flagging content that goes against the guidelines, and most importantly contributing thoughtful, helpful critique through commenting. While we can’t give away our secret sauce, it’s safe to say that “great work” type comments are worth substantially less than a well thought-out response. I’m looking forward to watching the system mature, and I’m confident it’s going to play a big role in Forrst.

What’s Next

Over the next month, we plan to roll out JSFiddle integration for code posts, premium user profiles/Forrst Pro, continue to iterate on the user experience, especially onboarding of new users, and so much more. We know there are some confusing aspects of the stream (comment vs. post liking, missing important context, etc.). The Snaps landing page could use some love, and we’re also aiming to make sharing code so much more useful.

As always, any questions or concerns please email hello AT forrst.com. Thanks for your continued support!

The New Forrst

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:08:00 -0500

I am extremely proud to announce that version 3 of Forrst has officially launched today. It is the culmination of more than three months of hard work and almost a year of learnings, not to mention the hundreds (if not thousands) of emails and posts from our community filled with suggestions, praise, bug reports, and critique. I’d like to share some of the highlights of Forrst v3, give a few updates about the team, and briefly talk about what the next year has in store.

What’s New

Here’s a list of some of the bigger changes in v3:

Perhaps two of the most exciting new features to come to Forrst are Promoted Posts and a new credit system, called Acorns. Promoted Posts allow any Forrst member in good standing get their posts in front of thousands of active Forrst members (great for job posts, requests for urgent feedback, or promoting a new product or service). Acorns are used by Promoted Posts, as well as a few things coming over the next few months, and are available for purchase now at: http://forrst.com/purchases More information about Promoted Posts may be found here: http://forrst.com/faq#s-promoted_posts
There’s a brand new homepage, courtesy of Mr. Keith Holjencin. While we absolutely loved the old homepage (get nostalgic here: http://cl.ly/3o3D1F1n2B0W0t3P1W0e), it just wasn’t doing the community justice; it didn’t really paint a clear picture of what Forrst was about in a way that anyone could quickly consume when coming to the site for the first time. The new homepage gives a peek into some of the great content being shared on the site, highlights members’ own stories about how Forrst has been a great asset in their careers, and also provides answers to commonly asked questions about being invited to join. Head to http://forrst.com/ and log out to see the new homepage in action.
Post pages have also been completely redesigned to be wider and less cluttered; snaps and code finally aren’t limited to a few hundred pixels wide. We have refined and polished dozens of aspects of the UI and user experience, including removing the heavy dependency on images for UI chrome, instead relying on pure CSS wherever possible. Requests now require far fewer images, and we’ve also rewritten our asset packager to serve a single file each for our JS and CSS. There’s a brand new navigation system, which let us eliminate a subnav bar, instead relying on a simpler menu system (which is also pure CSS, we might add). Check out the new UI: http://forrst.com/
The Forrst architecture has been completely rewritten from the ground up so that we’re not only able to offer a faster, more stable experience (each request uses an order of magnitude less memory and some pages are up to 75% faster), but we’re also able to build new features more quickly and with less code. All of this has been accomplished with a new PHP5 framework written in-house, called Magnus. Our goal is to open-source Magnus sometime in 2011.
We’ve rewritten the Markdown-based library that handles formatting posts and comments so that it’s more predictable and less annoying (trust us, we feel your pain about it!) We have also built a slew of moderation tools (Hi, Mike!) that let our community manager and moderators do their job more quickly and in a more automated fashion (don’t worry, you’ll still receive emails from a real human if we’ve got to contact you for any reason).
Every bit of code on Forrst, whether in a post or comment, has a new “Raw” link that provides a way to quickly view and copy that code. We’re also planning on integrating with popular code snippet sharing services, such as JSFiddle, Pastie, and GitHub’s Gist.
Some other highlights: Activity Streams now more correctly remember where you were when you last left off (no more broken Back button), you can like comments right from the stream (no more leaving the page), there’s finally a FAQ! (http://forrst.com/faq), you can now post drafts of posts, there’s a brand new ad system (crafted by Mr. Zack Kitzmiller) that lays the groundwork for a fully self-serve system sometime in the future, and finally, people lists are now displayed in a more clear, “card” style: http://forrst.com/people/list/developers

While this list only touches on some of the more prominent features of the new Forrst, there’s a ton more we haven’t shared here. Head over to Forrst and have a look for yourself. We’re so proud of it, and we hope you love the new stuff: http://forrst.com/

We’re Growing

It’s an exciting time for Forrst, LLC, too: I’m pleased to welcome Zack Kitzmiller and Mike Evans to the team. Zack is joining me on the dev side, and Mike is coming on as our full-time Community Manager and Official Podcast Maker Guy (he was previously helping part-time). I’d also like to extend a hearty thanks to Keith Holjencin, who has been pushing pixels for Forrst from time to time and is responsible for the UI realignment in v3. It’s been an honor to work with these folks on Forrst, and I’m looking forward to having them all on board for the long haul.

The Future

It’s hard to believe Forrst is almost a year old already. It seems like just yesterday I fired up TextMate and wrote the first lines of what would become Forrst v1. I’m so grateful to our community for being as awesome as they are. Without you guys, Forrst would be nothing. It’s been amazing to see how far things have come. I’m looking forward to the next year; it’s going to be an exciting one! We’ve also got plans to keep building the Forrst community and product (including some neat premium features coming in January), as well as to look at ways we can grow Forrst the brand as well (other verticals, a private product for Teams, and so forth).

Thank You

That about wraps things up. I urge you to check out the new Forrst for yourself: http://forrst.com/ I’d love to hear any and all feedback you’ve got; there’s a Contact link at the bottom of every page. I’d also like to thank the Forrst community at large, our beta testers who managed to break every last bit of v3, Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk for believing in me and in Forrst early on, as well as the numerous folks (Brooke, Nate, Spencer, Jacob, Brady, Dave, Chrissie, and others) who’ve offered guidance and support while we’ve built something great. Thank you.

— Kyle Bragger, Founder & Lead Developer

(Also, the related HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024651)

A quick note on the Forrst Guidelines

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:32:33 -0500

I’d like to take a moment to go into a bit of detail regarding one of the Forrst guidelines, as it seems to be one of the most frequently overlooked on Forrst:

Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at.

We ask that all posts have clear, thoughtful descriptions and that they are well-formatted (i.e. full sentences, proper punctuation, and so forth). Taking a few extra minutes to make sure you’ve provided a detailed description and a well-formatted post shows that you care about what you’re sharing, and that you’re keen on making sure other Forrsters can follow along with your posts. Posts that lack any kind of description tend to not create much meaningful discussion, as there’s only so much to be said about posts like “I was bored”, “Just some code”, or “Icons.” We’re starting to be more assertive about enforcing this guideline, so I wanted to address it before hand and to give a heads-up.

We’d really appreciate it if you’d also take the time to review the guidelines, as they’ve recently been updated.

Thanks so much, and please feel free to email with any questions: kyle at forrst dot com.

-Kyle

You should follow Forrst on Twitter here.

We've just released a new set of Forrst Guidelines

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:17:03 -0400

We've just released a new set of Forrst Guidelines:

We just released a vastly revised set of Forrst Guidelines. The new guidelines are composed of two parts: six core guidelines for Forrst posts and the behavior of its members, and a second part designed to act as a reference for types of posts that probably aren’t a good fit for what the community is about.

I hope that you’ll take a moment to read them, and feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns (my email is at the bottom of the page). I also hope that these new guidelines provide a much clearer framework for what Forrst is about; they not only include what belongs or doesn’t belong, but also an explanation why, as it relates to our vision for the community.

-Kyle Bragger

A post-mortem of today's downtime

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:02:44 -0400

A post-mortem of today's downtime:

Tumblr somehow posted it to my personal blog instead of this one. Alas.