Into The Forrst

The official blog of Forrst.

[forrst]

New Messages System!

Greetings Forrsters,

One of the great things about Forrst is how many designers and developers have connected through the site, and gone on to build lasting relationships and really cool products.

There's Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo, who were a part of the Forrst App Contest back in 2010, and went on to build Kippt. And Jason Lotito and Sam Mularczyk, who came together to build Ductmail as part of the same contest.

So in an effort to make it even easier to connect with your fellow members, we're launching a new private messaging system today.

Now you can take your conversations out of the public view to discuss collaborating on projects together, give more personal feedback, and get to know each other in a way that hasn't been possible before.

You can send a message to a member by clicking the "Message" button on their profile page.

And you can find an overview of all of your conversations by clicking on the "Messages" link in the account dropdown menu.

We hope you get a lot of use out of the new messages system, and go on to collaborate to create even more great work together.

(PS: We were able to repurpose some of the dev work we've been doing at Creative Market to make this messaging feature come to life here on Forrst. We look forward to more opportunities to bring the goods together between sites.)

Let us know what you think →

- Aaron

[forrst]

New Post System!

Hey Forrsters! Today we're launching a new post system that we're hoping will improve the quality of posts on Forrst, and allow you to go into even more depth with the content you share here.

Want to add multiple images to a post? Want to add both images and code to a post? Want multiple code blocks on a post? The new post system makes it easy to do all of these and more!

While the old system forced you to categorize your post type upfront - you had to pick whether it was a Link, Snap, Code, or Question - the new system does away with that, letting the actual content of your post define what type it is.

The new system is built around the concept of "Content Blocks" in your posts. You can add multiple blocks of images, code, text or links, and drag to rearrange them to build your post however you'd like. So now you can easily share more screenshots behind your design process, write up in-depth tips and tutorials (for Photoshop, etc), and get feedback on code samples with inline screenshots.

The post stream has also been updated with new buttons at the top to quickly let you toggle how posts are displayed (Recent, Popular, From People You're Following), as well as filters to control the types of content you want to see in your stream (Snaps, Code, Links, Questions). So if you're a designer who's not as interested in seeing posts with code, just uncheck the "Code" filter option to customize your post stream.

We think this is a big improvement to the way posts and streams were handled before, but what matters most to us is getting your feedback on how it works for you. So please take a moment to check out the new changes, then leave a comment here to let us know what you think.

We're hoping you'll find creative new ways to use the additional power and control that comes with the new post system, and we're excited to see what you share.

Let us know what you think →

- Aaron

[forrst]

Updates from the Forrst

Howdy Forrst folks, It’s been a little over 2 months since Forrst joined the COLOURlovers & Creative Market family, and I wanted to share a bit of our vision for the amazing community here, tell you about a few improvements we’ve already made to the site, and hear more from you about what you’d like to see from your community. Much like the passionate community we’ve built over at COLOURlovers, we know that Forrst is nothing without the talented members that visit, contribute, and share their design and dev knowledge with the rest of the community.  Our small startup is built on the mission to make the creative process simple and accessible to everyone, and we want to continue to push Forrst to be the best place to learn (from each other!) and improve your craft. Helping others to learn involves opening up some of the great knowledge and answers shared by the community, so that non-members can learn from the experts on Forrst and eventually join the community to be able to contribute and give back themselves.  That’s why we’ve taken down the “walled” homepage that non-members used to see, and replaced it with public posts from the community.  We hope that you’ll feel encouraged to make your posts visible to non-members, to help others currently outside the walls of the community. We also know that sometimes you don’t want to just share a snap, or just share code, but sometimes want a combo of links, code and snaps (or many of each).  That’s why we’re working on a brand new posting system that will let you build your posts inline on the page, exactly as they’ll look when you click the “Post” button, so you won’t even need to preview.  You’ll be able to add multiple screenshots, multiple code blocks, mix and match, and design your post however you’d like.  We hope this will open up a bunch of new possibilities for posts, including making it super easy to post multi-step tutorials, tips and tricks. When it comes to viewing the post feed, we know not everyone on Forrst is a designer interested in snaps, and not everyone is a coder interested in code posts.  So we’re working to improve the post stream to let you quickly toggle between recent, popular and posts from people you follow, and also filter out any post types you’re not interested in seeing.  We hope this will make it easier to find more of the posts you care about on Forrst, and filter out the ones you’re not as interested in. And with all this development going on, I’m excited to announce that Michael Hasselbring has joined the team to lead a lot of the dev on Forrst, and he’s already been working hard on the new features above.  He’s been a longtime Forrst member, so it’s great to have him contributing with more than just comments and advice for other members, but actually supporting the entire community with code. Along with the work Michael’s putting in, your friendly neighborhood Forrst community ranger Mike Evans continues to be on the lookout for amazing posts, supporting the community and making sure things are running smoothly.  He’s also heading up our effort to recognize members who go out of their way to give back.  When we see comments or posts that go above and beyond to add value to other members or the community as a whole, we’re throwing out acorns as our way of saying “thanks” for helping to make the community a great place to learn and grow. Ultimately, this is your community and we want to hear more from you about what you think will make it even better.  We’re always here to listen, so looking forward to your thoughts in the comments over on Forrst. - Aaron, Forrst Ranger

[forrst]

NORRST: The New Evolution. A roundhouse kick to the face of design & development.

So when news broke last week that we had acquired Forrst, there were a few people who were worried that we were going to come in and ruin the awesome community that existed here. Well let me be the first to share with you that we've done exactly the opposite. I'd like to introduce you to the new Forrst… Norrst.

We realized that the thing that Forrst has been missing the most, is a bit more foot to ass motivation… well, foot to face ala a roundhouse kick to be exact. And that's what the new site is all about.

Look for more exciting features soon like grenades replacing acorns and the ability to post uppercuts.

Happy April 1st.

-Bubs, CEO of Norrst

[forrst]

Big news: Forrst has been acquired by COLOURlovers

I’m thrilled to announce that Forrst has been acquired by the folks behind COLOURlovers and Creative Market, and that Keith, Mike, and I will be joining their team.

It’s crazy to think that Forrst started two years ago as nothing more than a side project used by just a handful of colleagues. Fast forward to today, and it’s become a place where nearly 50,000 designers and developers are able to share knowledge and get feedback on what they’re working on, and connect in meaningful ways with people that share their passion.

Growing a community is no easy business, and I’m immensely proud of the job we’ve done thus far. Now, with Darius and his team we have a chance to scale the Forrst community and vision even bigger. They understand community in a way few folks do, and I’m really excited about the future of Forrst, and indeed, that of the entire COLOURlovers family.

While I’m certain some aspects of Forrst will make their way into the other COLOURlovers sites and vice versa, Forrst will continue to operate as its own product. It’s a truly great fit with COLOURlovers’ bigger vision to help designers and developers alike grow their craft and be rewarded for their talents.

—Kyle Bragger, Founder

[forrst]

On what's next.

I'm really, really excited to be writing this post today. Big things are afoot at [Forrst](https://forrst.com), 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](http://500.co/2011/10/31/500-accelerator-zombies/). Dave participated in [our seed round in March](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/24/forrst-200000-seed/), 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](https://forrst.com/jobs) around a week ago. (PS - [We can help you hire.](https://forrst.com/hire/blog)) 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](https://tinyproj.com) 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](http://twitter.com/kylebragger)

[forrst]

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

[forrst]

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.

[forrst]

New Moderation Tools

Part of what makes Forrst unique is its highly focused set of [Guidelines](http://forrst.com/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](http://forrst.com/-zackkitzmiller) and [Mike](http://forrst.com/-mike) for a job well done. \* if someone egregiously flags your post, we'll simply clear it out. No harm done.

[forrst]

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.

[forrst]

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

[forrst]

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:


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

Zack Kitzmiller

[forrst]

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

[forrst]

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]

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

[forrst]

A quick note about Promoted Posts.

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

[forrst]

On our recent changes to the Forrst Guidelines.

Howdy, folks. As of this morning, there are a few notable changes to the [Forrst Guidelines](http://forrst.com/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](http://www.deviantart.com/) (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