Growing up, I spent a lot of time on the 4hv.org forums. I’d read through threads for hours, sometimes attempting to recreate the projects I found there, learning what I could. More often than not I was limited by age and resources, but the fascination stuck with me.

Having long since grown up, I now have the time and means to pursue those projects properly. But alas, the forums have fallen into disrepair. I can no longer sign in. Broken CAPTCHA puzzles lock out new and existing members alike. Image hosting is finnicky at best. Many of the old regulars have migrated to places like highvoltageforum.net.

This slow decay made me realise something: it’s not just the discussions and community I miss. It’s the style. That early-2000s forum structure, the aesthetic, the way it all felt. You see very little of that on the modern web.

So I decided to recreate it.

Why Ruby on Rails

Part of this was scratching an itch. Part of it was an excuse to learn a new language stack.

Coming from Kotlin and TypeScript, Ruby on Rails offered a nice way to familiarise myself with more distinctly OOP patterns. Rails is known for convention over configuration, which gave me an easy framework to follow while still leaving room to explore.

Features

The original forum had everything it needed to facilitate what I’d still consider some of the highest quality conversations on high voltage, tesla coils, electromagnetic radiation, chemistry, and more. When it comes down to it, the ability to write posts and share pictures is all you really need.

That said, modern web design offers some nice opportunities to expand on that foundation. I added a few features:

• Image uploads and embedding
• YouTube video embedding
• Inline STL-based 3D model rendering
• Inline LaTeX/KaTeX math rendering
• Markdown-based content and wiki
• A chat room
• A member map
• Responsive, mobile-friendly design

All while maintaining an identical style to the original. That’s the key point of the exercise.

The Result

You can see the fruits of this labour here: 4hv.forum