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Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes
- maliman 10y agoA DigitalOcean like support community for your website in 3 minutes Hi, Soufian from Haash here, i've always found DigitalOcean support community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions smart and fascinating. A clever way to deliver support and manage knowledge. One of the reasons they came from nothing and became rapidly popular. Haash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start using it. Would be happy to answer any questions
- satysin 10y agoAre you in any way associated with Dropbox? If not your site feels a little too familiar.
- maliman 10y agoNo. kind of, the colors and the simplicity maybe. Dropbox's UX is a good design and UX standard.
- fibbery 10y agoWow no, it's not just the colors. Putting their front page and yours side by side the similarities are unmistakeable (nav position and style, button styles, use of centered line drawing on landing page, some of the copy). Whether it was intentional or not, I would change some things up to avoid confusing people and any legal implications that might have.
- tobltobs 10y agoAnd don't forget those buttons with round corners. /s
- freehunter 10y agoSooo... basically they used Bootstrap like every other site? The thing that's throwing you is the hand-drawn picture of a computer, like Dropbox has. Other than that, it looks like every other site that uses Bootstrap.
- photoGrant 10y agoI'm sad you were down voted because I felt this was a Dropbox project, too. Especially with the graphic element. It DOES feel a little too familiar. If multiple people's opinions are to be rejected, well...
- mbenjaminsmith 10y agoWould this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.
- maliman 10y agoYes it meant to be a better replacement for classic forums that are generally noisy and hard to deal with. Haash works more like Stackoverflow when it comes to questions and stays very simple with tutorials crowdsourcing too. For using it as a customer support, generally DO encourages you to publish your question on the community instead of going with private chat and support tickets as when the question and answer go public everyone else can benefit from it and most importantly find it in milliseconds when searching on Google. another reason is that your need for creating docs out of repetitive support queries massively drops as the Q&A is your docs.
- yalooze 10y agoSmall piece of feedback but I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read (it's far from the worst I've seen but if you compare it to the DO community you link to, theirs is easier to read). Also, the home view eg. https://slack.haash.io/ https://slack.haash.io/ feels quite wide and is hard to look across to see the 'Date' and 'Views' which are all the way to the right. When you click into a question eg. https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactivated-members-have-uploaded https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactiv... this width seems good and is easier to scan. Overall I like the clean and simple approach. Very little noise to distract you which is nice.
- maliman 10y agoHi Yalooz, thanks for the insights. Ok we'll work on that
- cabalamat 10y ago> I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read Changing it from 300 weight Lato to 400 weight of the same font would also help.
- maliman 10y agoGot it, we'll revise it sure,
- hanspeter 10y agoJust nitpicking a little. It's not the contrast that needs adjustment. The font color is almost black which should give sufficient contrast on a white background. The font width is very thin however, and it would make it more legible to increase the font width in the body text.
- onion2k 10y agoIsn't the good thing about community support the people who help rather than the tool that's used to run it? You can't build a community of helpful, interested people in 3 minutes.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoYes, but tools matter. Seems like a great service to help guide users into helping one another (at least more so than just having a separate support email and maybe a knowledge base).
- corobo 10y agoCall it a lack of coffee but I also clicked out of intrigue as to how they were going to slot your site into a community of willing volunteers.
- maliman 10y agoVery funny lol
- lai 10y agoCool idea but I would highly suggest that you fix all the misspelled words.
- maliman 10y agoOk we'll so sorry about that
- fiatjaf 10y agoI don't like DigitalOcean community.
- skewart 10y agoWhat don't you like about it? (Just curious, I don't have much experience with it myself)
- fiatjaf 10y agoI don't know. Too much duplicated content and unanswered threads. I have to sign in to participate.
- maliman 10y agoAll the communities have to deal with that at some point, but that doesn't prevent good value from happening. One thing we did at Haash is letting members know of existing questions while they're typing a new one.
- neom 10y agoWhy?
- martinald 10y agoNice idea, I like it. Not sure about the name at all. Sounds like marijuana distribution as as service :).
- maliman 10y agoHahahah, Illegal Substances as a Service aka ISAS. It's a metaphor from Haashs on ruby, a collection of data :)
- atmosx 10y agoWell that would be profitable from day one...
- maliman 10y agoGuaranteed!
- akuji1993 10y agoI second thinking about the name, again.
- freehunter 10y agoHow do you get marijuana from haash? I know the word "hash" in marijuana terms, but I associate the word more with hashing a password (or maybe hash browns) than with drugs.
- tajen 10y agoI like the name. At least I remembered it easily enough that I was able to give the name to a coworker 1hr later. To me it sounds related to hashing passwords and to the DigitalOcean inspiration, which is enough to remember it. People will remember it, it's short, the domain name is available, the only drawback is the collision with Ha-ash the music band, and not being at the top of Google when searching for "haash". But that will change, right ;) ?
- 10y ago
- ricardobeat 10y agoCommunities don't seem to work on mobile at all.
- maliman 10y agoSorry about, we're digging into that
- poorman 10y agoThis is actually nicely done.
- maliman 10y agoThank you!
- mrwebmaster 10y agoI'm using http://www.question2answer.org/ http://www.question2answer.org/ , how does it compares to it? Q2A doesn't have: - instant search - Intercom integration - Single Sign-on
- maliman 10y agoIn addition One-click setup, Realtime notification, Custom URLs FAQs Tutorials management And other cool stuff we'll be shipping soon
- poorman 10y agoNot sure what's up with the A/B testing though. Plus pricing seems to change between a slider starting at $29/mo and a flat $5/mo fee.
- maliman 10y agoOups! sorry about that. Alongside with the support community, we have a FAQs module. The two makes a smart help center (FAQs and community). You ended up on the main help center landing page where there are two pricing schemes . One if you use only FAQs $5/mo and the other if you use both (FAQs and community) starting at $29/mo.
- akuji1993 10y agoThe UI of your site needs to be a little reworked. I don't want to click on every single FAQ question and get taken to another site, for example. Also, being able to only login with FB or Twitter is not acceptable. There absolutely need to be free accounts, as well as Google Account Logins. A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.
- maliman 10y agoThank you feedback noted. We'll add email login and fine tune the UI soon
- iuguy 10y agoI like it. In fact I have a project in mind for which I might use it next year. I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking into. Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to give it a try.
- maliman 10y agoThank you, we'll definitely fine tune as we learn.
- samsolomon 10y agoI'd suggest allowing people to signup via email. Many people don't want to attach their social accounts to business functions.
- gressquel 10y agoyep, as soon as I saw facebook integration I quit.
- maliman 10y agoSorry about that, it's only a quick way to get started and a lazy way to have its avatar and bio autofilled. We'll add the email signup very soon.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rgbrenner 10y agoCan you send me an email after you add it? My email is in my profile. I don't do social media at all. I don't even have a facebook or twitter account. This looks useful (something I would pay for), but I need to take a closer look at it.
- maliman 10y agoCool, I'll definitely do!
- amdavidson 10y agoMany people would not be permitted to attach their social accounts. My workplace requires that we associate our accounts strictly through things they will be able to access after employees leave (IE a company email address).
- maliman 10y ago
- neom 10y agoThis is epic. As a former-digitaloceaner I know how much work went into building the community (the community director at DigitalOcean is incredibly good at her job) and how well it as served the business. If you have the ability and time to build a community around your product, I highly recommend it, brand evangelists are something you simply cannot buy.
- adim86 10y agoI love the branding on this product, very light and fun, also friendly and catchy. It reminds me of dropbox. Great work, maybe when you make some money you can get a good logo to go with it. Good stuff!
- maliman 10y agoAwesome, glad you liked the design
- smoyer 10y agoTo create an account, you have to agree to the terms of service: "By signing up you indicate that you have read and agree to the Terms of the service" Being a conscientious user, I click through to read what I'm agreeing to and find: "You do not have permission to perform this operation" IANAL but I'm pretty sure this won't be legally binding.
- _puk 10y agoTried to read the terms and conditions.. got an error [0] Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable. Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook / Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash" That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup. 0: https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_32_07.png https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_3...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- scosman 10y ago$5 a month for the FAQ product? Charge waaaaay more for a product targeted at businesses.
- i__believe 10y agoOne thing you may consider is having private or invite only communities. Almost all the offerings out there are for public communities, which leaves in house self help an untapped market.
- maliman 10y agoYes that's a good way to go to. Although you might hack Haash right now to not show questions and answers to the public, we might consider a sophisticated version of that.
- dutchbrit 10y agoLooks really nice! Searching is a tad slow but I have seen slower. Maybe implementing ElasticSearch might be a nice idea. Would also result in better search results.
- brilliantcode 10y agoYES! I was looking for exactly this last year. I'm so glad somebody found the time to make a product out of it.
- sakopov 10y agoNot a DigitalOcean user here but this looks like StackExhange clone for small online businesses. Is this correct? Very nice and clean.
- maliman 10y agoYes, the Q&A is Stackoverflow like but the overall support community is DigitalOcean like https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions
- marktangotango 10y agoIs there a 'whitelabel' capability with this service? Ie, could I point community.mysite.com at your servers with a cname record? Does anyone else care about this?
- maliman 10y agoYes you can use your own domain name with a CNAME. Email me at malih.soufian at gmail.com once you create your Haash and we'll make the config for you
- abreu 10y agoAlways start with email signup first. Not the other way around. You just lost a ton of potential beta-testers and users on your HN moment.
- maliman 10y agoGot it, We though Twitter & Facebook are a good way to get people easily onboarded and their details filled in effortlessly. PS: For those afraid of any privacy issues, the permissions are very basic, we do only get your email, avatar and short bio.
- zbuttram 10y agoReally looking forward to trying this out, but definitely need this first. Seems fine for users, but would rather not force my support team to log in with their social accounts.
- maliman 10y agoWe'll add email signup very soon, can you fill in this form so that we let you know https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . Thank you!
- morgante 10y agoSocial accounts are fine for consumer products but many people justifiably don't want to use them for business products. Keeping them separate is a key part of business hygiene. For me, it's not about the privacy issues. It's that accounts tied to my personal social networks are much harder to transfer/remove/control.
- maliman 10y agoWe've put up this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI for those who exclusively want to sign up with email. We'll add email sign up very soon and let you know. Thank you!
- estrabd 10y agoYou had me until I had to use pedo twitter or Fakebook. No thanks.
- willow9886 10y agoTypo in the "A built-in Q&A engine for community support" section.. publicaly -> publicly.
- maliman 10y agoThanks for catching it
- maliman 10y agoFor those frustrated that there's no email signup, please fill in this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . We'll notify you once we add it very soon. Thank you!
- tooFastFuckYou 10y agoDon't blow your wad on an announcement when you don't have the sign-up procedure in place. Also, the title is perplexing. I thought DigitalOcean was a VPS provider, not a "support community" provider. So I visited your site, but there's no explanation of what this is. I looked at the three "examples," but the links just dump you onto pages with a search field and what looks like a FAQ. I would have expected a list of features this thing offers, and why it's different from competing products (if there are any, and what they are). And maybe a screen shot pointing out some of said features. I've just spent several minutes HUNTING for an explanation of why I should be interested in your product, instead of reading a concise description of what it will do for me and how. That does not bode well.
- jakegry 10y agohttps://buffer.com/ https://buffer.com/ -> https://haash.io/ https://haash.io/
- andruby 10y agoWhat do you mean? They are both very different tools, no?
- kowdermeister 10y agoI don't get this. Is this different than installing a modern OS forum engine?
- maliman 10y agoIt's a Q&A which is different from a forum, i will quote Adam Lear [1] from this answer [2] on Stackoverfolw to point out the differences(Stackoverflow being a Q&A) [quote] Stack Overflow is not a forum. Forums are largely discussion-based and tend to follow less strict rules about what posts can be like. On Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general), we require every new thread to be started with a question and every response to that question to be an attempt at answering it. For example, on a forum you might ask how to run a game in windowed mode. You will get several responses, some of which will be nothing but "oh, I love that game!" or "I haven't played that in a while, wow." You'll be lucky if you get a relevant response. By contrast, on Stack Exchange you'd get practical responses that are 100% relevant to your question. [end quote] This model (meaning the Q&A) has been proven to be extremely efficient in managing community driven support. DigitalOcean community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions is one successful example. Alongside with the Q&A, DigitalOcean introduced Tutorials crowdsourcing which also proved to be a smart and cost efficient vector of educating customers and sharing knowledge. What Haash does is letting you create a similar support infrastructure at very low price and in just 3 minutes. [1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-lear http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-lear [2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-overflow-a-forum http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-overf...
- kowdermeister 10y agoDo you provide the community pool as well? I have this confusing feeling but that would sound too good :)
- maliman 10y agoDo you mean the stuff to take care of it? We wish we could :) For now it's only the tool
- sideproject 10y agoFor those who are interested in creating a more full featured online community, I run HelloBox https://www.hellobox.co https://www.hellobox.co Haash.io looks simple and nice. HelloBox would be for those looking for other bells and whistles.
- lllorddino 10y agoDigital Ocean tutorials are probably the best and simplest ones to follow. Neat idea.
- nkkollaw 10y agomaliman, I found this: "Can I control who can ask and answer on Haash\'s support community?". It looks like you're not escaping things correctly.
- openclosed 10y agoError on your homepage: "our's" should be "ours". :)