[jimrhoskins]

Hey, I wrote this, so I can answer a few of the questions.

Why not discourse/reddit/telescope/etc...? I looked into those. Solving the problem we needed a few basic things, posts, threaded comments, and votes. The killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company, and we wanted authentication integrated with http://teamtreehouse.com. Hacking any existing solutions to fit that auth model seemed more work than it was worth.

When it comes down to it, it's a ridiculously simple app. There's a few models, and not a whole lot of code. When we gauged the effort of integrating most of the OS solutions into our oauth system and locking it down to be in-company only, just making the app was way easier. Plus. we can easily extend it to fit our needs, and we have. Also, I wanted to play w/ rails 4 + ruby 2 for the first time.

Regarding the name, it was a code name. The tool is built for having conversations (convos), and I though convoy was a cool codename. As soon as Ryan saw my working prototype, he told me to launch it, and the name stuck. I didn't even know there was a movie.

[mistercow]

>The killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company

Seems like selling private subreddits (much like github sells private repositories) would be a really obvious and easy way for reddit to increase their cashflow, since I'm sure more than just companies would be interested in that.

[na85]

Too much downtime

[Splendor]

I'm more interested in the culture-building aspect of this. Can you give us some examples of the types of conversations that take place in Convoy?

[jimrhoskins]

Well it's primary purpose was to cut email. And it has. We had a lot of emails that had a lot of replies that were not actionable, like birthday emails, and new hire intros. After 30 "Happy Birthdays!" and "Welcome to the team!" responses you get pretty annoyed seing the thread hit your inbox.

We also has a lot of emails about interesting articles about our company, or the space we're in. Sometimes discussions would happen in email, and not being well threaded it was hard to follow. Also those emails are not usually actionable, but they appear in your inbox.

We post a lot of interesting links in convoy, as well as all the above categories of conversation. It definitely has more of a reddit feel than a HN feel. It's not a work-only type of environment. We have fun. Since the video team has hours of video of the teachers, they have this habbit of making embarrassing animated gifs and posting them, which is fun.

We don't really have rules about what you CAN post in convoy, we have guidelines about what you SHOULDN'T put in email. If it's not a good convoy post, votes will take care of it.

[deelowe]

But you can run private versions of reddit pretty easily. Any reason you wrote your own instead of just installing the opensource(and somewhat prepackaged) version of reddit?

[coolsunglasses]

He already explained this. Hacking the auth would've been more work and provided less opportunity to tinker, have fun, and learn anything he cared about (Rails 4, Ruby 2).

[sgdesign]

Telescope dev here. Completely understand why you'd roll your own solution, but just want to point out that Telescope can be made private just by checking a checkbox :)

[jimrhoskins]

Good stuff. I like telescope. Largely the reason we rolled our own is for us to easily integrate it with our auth. We use a bunch of internal tools, and having them integrated with our Treehouse auth is really nice. Not having a separate user database for each tool is great for getting people to use it, and managing new employees and the employees who leave the company.

Telescope was my favorite of the choices I saw. Great work.

[RandallBrown]

At a company I used to work for we ran our own reddit server and hacked it to use ActiveDirectory for authentication. It was really cool.

[jherrick]

Interested in hearing more about this. Taking care of this would help with the adoption (and priority) of this project. If you have any tips, please feel free to drop a line at jherrick at gmail. Thanks!