Are you at least some other kind of developer? Building or maintaining a website (or anything!) on Arc is a rather code-it-all-yourself process. Here are a few things that might disappoint you along the way:
- The Arc language comes with the ability to host an HN-like website, but unfortunately the current HN has been modified significantly since the most recent release of Arc. For instance, Arc's news.arc doesn't have OpenID support or a search bar.
- Even if someone did want to recreate HN's support for OpenID in news.arc, HN's approach is based on an external service, Clickpass, whose only documentation is "Clickpass is being reworked. Please, don't develop against the current Clickpass implementation." http://www.clickpass.com/docs
- A while back I linked to a few discussions of websites based on news.arc (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=13277)... but since then, every single one of the sites mentioned has either gone down or turned into a different kind of site. ^_^; Except for HN and Arc Forum, that is! These two are the only live news.arc-based sites I know.
On the plus side, if you're plucky enough to climb this mountain, we're happy to help guide you in the right direction. Specific questions and examples of the code you're trying to write are good places for us to start helping you.
If you'd prefer to keep the code you write to a minimum, I'm afraid I'd have to recommend some other platform. Personally I think just setting up a group on Convore is a pretty good way to get an HN-style forum. :-p (Unfortunately, Convore's apparently been terribly slow for months. @_@ ) If you need the freedom to modify the forum code, there might be a good starting point somewhere in the Django world (https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/ForumAppsComparison) or of course you might be able to use one of the many PHP forum engines. Those languages aren't nearly as nifty as Arc ;) but they will likely have a much higher volume of community support.
Hopefully someone else will come to the rescue with even better options. :-p
Thanks for your detailed response. I have a development background - mostly scripting on mainframe systems, but no web development experience. The HN format seems so clean and simple I figured there would be a lot of support for it somewhere even if it is not written in ARC in the same way that Digg has a bunch of open source options for someone who wants to 'clone' the site. Yes site administration would be a big consideration for me too - Is HN as simple on the backend for the admin as it is for users on the front end. If developing and deploying the site turns out to be out of my depth I would gladly outsource it to someone else but knowing where to start in terms of what open source options are out there that are currently closest to the goal of what I want to achieve comes first. The PHP bbs wont work for me. So, still looking...
Getting a HN clone up and running isn't too bad, and the version of news.arc available is very stable as is. Also, the folk in this forum are very friendly and willing to answer questions. I don't think that getting your HN clone up and running would be much more difficult than any other forum.
Tip: if you are looking to customize news.arc, I would start by working it out of the table formatting and into CSS. If not, it's a pretty rigid beast. It's worth the effort, and would also be a good way to get familiar with the code.
As an FYI aw (aka CatDancer) once provided code for arc/OpenID support. -> http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3333. Link is no longer valid and aws currently published pages[1] don't appear to contain the code. I'm sure if someone needed it they could contact him and he would be willing to help[2].
