I enjoy the experience of using less-wrong. I believe it's one of the best-designed websites I've ever had the pleasure of stumbling upon.

I also have a personal blog, and I've been considering revamping it. While I do enjoy coding from scratch, I've been considering using a pre-existing platform.

Using WordPress plus some themes is always an option, but I feel like this would be an overkill since the "feel" of LW so closely aligns to my own tastes.

I'm curios if anyone else is doing this (using the LW codebase for their own project, be it a blog, a discussion form, or something else), and how it's going thus far ?

More specifically, I'd be curious:

What kind of machine (very roughly speaking) would you need to handle top volumes ~20,000 visitors/hr (say, max 3,000/min) without the core functionality breaking and ~500 visitors/hr (say, max 100/min) with top-notch user experience (assuming optimal db, distro and reverse proxy choices)
How hard is it to setup the sys admin side of things ? Deploying a prod server behind an nginx with a non-sqlite db and pointing it to your own cdn
How hard is it to modify the theme (e.g. fonts, color-scheme, icons) ?
How hard is it to integrate your own 3rd party service or get rid of them ? Specifically, add your own app cred for the signups and remove google analytics, intercom and all other 3rd party integrations that would make Richard stallman cry which aren't critical to the commenting experience.
Are the makers of LW explicitly fine and open to it being used by other people or is it open source mainly for the sake of community debugging?
What are particularly difficult/annoying/deal-breaking parts of the setup that were unexpected?

... Hopefully the question is not too out of place, it seemed to fit the form better than the repo.

katic

katic

katic

katic