The realtime magic behind Moot and how we deliver all your instant notifications (opens in new tab)

the last thing any startup needs is 4chan's wrath.

You're right, the ents will be pissed ;)

It's a really good name for forum software - better than Discourse for a few reasons:

- one syllable, one easy phonetic spelling - archaic, so it won't be confused in everyday speech - it doesn't sound like it might do something else. Discourse could be online learning, golf venue rankings, etc.

Yes we intent to open source all of this. No timeframe in mind. We need to get through our beta roadmap before packaging up the various pieces we plan on open sourcing.

You may be interested in dnode[0] as well. Protocol documented here[1].

[0] https://github.com/substack/dnode

[1] https://github.com/substack/dnode-protocol/blob/master/doc/p...

Hmm I think you must have hit it while we were doing a deploy. Looks like the www alias points right to S3 instead of our CDN. The CDN would have hidden the bucket reconfiguration. Oops.

Will be updating the alias to point to the CDN. Thanks for catching that.

Yes we do see this as becoming a bottleneck. We are already working on a solution for that. I mention in the "What's Next" section about a bit more advanced routing using ZeroMQ instead of Redis.

The problem is a difficult one to say the least. We're nowhere near the bottleneck now, but we do want to resolve this long before it is close to becoming an issue.

That central location is Redis pub/sub. Multiple publishers publish to Redis and many JSON-RPC instances listen and then process the notifications to distribute.

The diagram is more meant to illustrate that the notifications don't just blanket deliver to all subscribers rather than be an exactly technically accurate.

Our infrastructure is built as a service. I totally understand that many people want to run their forum on their own network and that's totally ok. There's plenty of products out there servicing that market.

If you were to compare us to blogging companies we're more inline with tumblr than wordpress. We're a service that makes it simple for anyone to add forums and commenting.

Our service obviously isn't for everyone, but we feel like there is a large market for simple to set up and manage forums that can integrate with little to no technical knowledge or expertise.

Why's that?

Reasons for why Moot is a hosted solution: https://moot.it/docs/technology.html#distributed-service

It sounds like what you want is to run a tyranny. Freedom for you, damnit.

I integrated Atmosphere into a Dropwizard-based project (not on GitHub yet, hoping to get it out there in a week or two -- look for Cyranix/mi5 if interested). Although I did get it to work, it wasn't a smooth experience. There seem to be many ways of accomplishing the same thing which are just different enough to trip you up in subtle ways (at least if you're only a moderately experienced dev like myself), and the documentation is a bit of a mess (scattered, not well translated from French, etc. -- not entirely, but enough to be a pain). Any JavaScript devs interested in this sort of tech could make a much-appreciated contribution to the project by making a client-side script that doesn't depend on jQuery.

During peak hours thousands per second, off hours not many at all.

Yes. You can have commenting threads based on the page. The value on the href attribute takes a form

https\://moot.it/i/[forumname]/[an_unique_path]

You'll get the [forumname] from the setup (https://moot.it/setup) and you need to pick an unique path for each of the commenting area. The paths can be designed to fit your site's structure. For example

/blog/2013/august:my-awesome-entry /blog/2013/june:another-blog-post

You can list all comments from any path such as

/blog/2013

The "/i/" part means SEO indexed content. Our servers automatically generate a search engine optimized version of all the comments that are structured according to the path structure. Here is the SEO content for our forums for example

https://moot.it/i/moot

And here are all comments from our release blog entries

https://moot.it/i/moot/blog/release

The way we handle SEO is one of the differences from Disqus.

Here is more information about the paths:

https://moot.it/docs/embedding.html#paths

@letsmoot :)