Обсуждение: Hackorum - a new mailing list frontend

Hello!

Last year at pgconf.dev there was a discussion about improving the
user interface for the hackers mailing list. Based on that discussion,
I would like to share a small project we have been working on for some
time:

https://hackorum.dev/

Hackorum provides a read-only (for now) web view of the mailing list
with a more forum-like presentation. It already includes a number of
useful features, such as:

* continuous mailing list synchronization (the site is subscribed to the list)
* commitfest integration (synchronized once per day)
* per-message read status for logged-in users
* user profiles, including contributor/committer status from the main website
* statistics
* additional logged-in user features (starring threads, tags, notes,
mentions on messages and threads)
* basic team support (sharing reading status, mentioned tags and notes)
* integrating the "resend email" feature from the official archive
* importing read status / tags from CSV files (to help migration from
email based workflows)

And the main features we plan to implement in the near future:

* sending emails using the web ui (initially using the gmail api for
users logged in with their google account, who also separately
authorized sending messages)
* advanced search functionality
* integrating other mailing lists

At this stage, we are mainly interested in feedback: whether this is
useful at all, and if you have suggestions on how it could be improved
(bug fixes, new features, changes in behavior, etc.). Contributions
are of course also welcome; we have tried to make the development
setup easy to work with:

https://github.com/Percona-Lab/hackorum

Hi!

I took a quick look and here a couple of things I've found:

- Threads with more than a couple of messages take a very long time to
load (many dozens of seconds).
- The search is also relatively slow.
- I find it difficult to match the thread outline to the actual message.
Making a visual connection between the thread outline and the currently
viewed message would be helpful.

David

On 16.01.2026 15:29, Zsolt Parragi wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Last year at pgconf.dev there was a discussion about improving the
> user interface for the hackers mailing list. Based on that discussion,
> I would like to share a small project we have been working on for some
> time:
> 
> https://hackorum.dev/
> 
> Hackorum provides a read-only (for now) web view of the mailing list
> with a more forum-like presentation. It already includes a number of
> useful features, such as:
> 
> * continuous mailing list synchronization (the site is subscribed to the list)
> * commitfest integration (synchronized once per day)
> * per-message read status for logged-in users
> * user profiles, including contributor/committer status from the main website
> * statistics
> * additional logged-in user features (starring threads, tags, notes,
> mentions on messages and threads)
> * basic team support (sharing reading status, mentioned tags and notes)
> * integrating the "resend email" feature from the official archive
> * importing read status / tags from CSV files (to help migration from
> email based workflows)
> 
> And the main features we plan to implement in the near future:
> 
> * sending emails using the web ui (initially using the gmail api for
> users logged in with their google account, who also separately
> authorized sending messages)
> * advanced search functionality
> * integrating other mailing lists
> 
> At this stage, we are mainly interested in feedback: whether this is
> useful at all, and if you have suggestions on how it could be improved
> (bug fixes, new features, changes in behavior, etc.). Contributions
> are of course also welcome; we have tried to make the development
> setup easy to work with:
> 
> https://github.com/Percona-Lab/hackorum
> 
> 

Thanks for trying it out so quickly!

> - Threads with more than a couple of messages take a very long time to
> load (many dozens of seconds).
> - The search is also relatively slow.

There was a load spike after I sent this message, normally it
shouldn't be that slow. Usually even the longest threads load under a
second. I'm keeping an eye on that now, but so far it seems like a
one-time thing, not a persistent issue.

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 02:29:41PM +0000, Zsolt Parragi wrote:
> Last year at pgconf.dev there was a discussion about improving the
> user interface for the hackers mailing list. Based on that discussion,
> I would like to share a small project we have been working on for some
> time:
> 
> https://hackorum.dev/

Nice!

> Hackorum provides a read-only (for now) web view of the mailing list
> with a more forum-like presentation. It already includes a number of
> useful features, such as:
> 
> * continuous mailing list synchronization (the site is subscribed to the list)
> * commitfest integration (synchronized once per day)
> * per-message read status for logged-in users
> [...]

This one feature in particular is very nice.  I wonder if you can make
it so you can subscribe in the sense of being an approved sender but not
in the sense of getting copies sent.

A read-only IMAP/JMAP server might also be nice, especially if it could
mark messages as read/replied-to/marked like this.  But yeah, the web
interface is not limited by IMAP/JMAP and can do so much more.

Nico
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