5 ms·
Show HN: HN Notify - Email reply notifications for comments and posts.
- ColinWright 15y agoIt seems that I can pretend to be someone else and get notified every time they get replied to. You could offer protection against that by asking that a long, semi-random string be placed in the profile of the person registering. I've registered, and I'll be watching with interest to see if it changes my relationship with the site.
- rkalla 15y agoColin, quick find. When I originally launched the beta I didn't include this functionality, but had a friend ask for it right away and it dawned one me that it might not be that uncommon for one HN user wanting to watch the interaction another user is having regularly (e.g. following 'pg' or 'patio11' conversations). Only because the information is public I figured "sure, why not" and added it. Although it occurs to me that the more appropriate feature might be a "Watch this user" type of signup which I would be happy to add down the road if people really wanted it. When you unsubscribe, the site will unsub you from every user account the email address you entered is watching, so you don't have to undo each one individually.
- pwaring 15y agoIs that a big problem? Replies are public, so signing up as another user is not leaking any private data.
- genieyclo 15y agoReplies are all public anyways. Besides, hackerstream.com let you do this with multiple people long before.
- akkartik 15y agoThere's a distinction between getting notified when multiple people comment, and when they get responses. Is the latter useful at all?
- Urgo 15y agoCool I just signed up. Thanks for creating this. Someone reply here so I can test it :)
- simonbrown 15y agoShouldn't it confirm email addresses before subscribing or unsubscribing people?
- acangiano 15y agoIn Canada it's a legal requirement. In the US, it's not, but it's still a very good idea to do so.
- thibaut_barrere 15y agoDidn't know about Canada - thanks!
- rkalla 15y agoYes absolutely it should, I'll add it shortly.
- rkalla 15y agoReally been enjoying the HN community and wanted to contribute this back to help keep people engaged in the conversations they are involved in even as those comments and replies are pushed down the page. For anyone interested, this is written with: - Play! Framework 1.2.3 - MongoDB 1.8.3 - jQuery (minor, I am not a UI guy) When you signup, it more or less adds a flag in the DB that you want emails when someone replies to you (whether it is a story reply or a comment reply) and when you unsubscribe it removes that flag. No stray account info or history is kept. Thanks goes out to the HN community for a hell of a lot of great information and I hope you guys find this handy.
- jeffehobbs 15y agoNeat! Thanks for this!
- u48998 15y agoIf this is so useful, than how come it is not available here on this site by default?
- troels 15y agoWhat does this provide that notifo doesn't?
- bvi 15y agoOn a related note - why is notifo still on the new user registration?
- rkalla 15y agoMy friendship. Seriously though, I haven't used notifo before so I don't know. It looks like a great service though.
- troels 15y agoHaha .. OK. When you go to your profile here on HN, there is a field where you can enter your notifo user name.
- doctoboggan 15y agoNotifo is shutting down.
- mdoerneman 15y agoNotifo will be shutting down. See here: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo http://blog.notifo.com/notifo
- troels 15y agoOh .. Didn't realise. That's sad news.
- ColinWright 15y agoI could troll someone by signing them up to follow, well, everyone. That could be a problem, couldn't it?
- rkalla 15y agoRight now, yes it could... please don't do that :) I'll add an email verification step soon.
- ColinWright 15y agoI think just requiring them to put a magic string in their profile would be fairly robust. Yes, it's another step, but I think everything requires an extra step. You just need to choose what that step will be.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI'm concerned about this as well. As someone who has their email on their profile, I'm afraid of pissing someone off and getting the troll treatment.
- pixdamix 15y agoWould it be possible to add XMPP support ? Then the service could check my XMPP status and postpone notifications if i'm away, busy, offline... I tend to prefer IM for this kind of things as it doesn't clutter my mailbox.
- rkalla 15y agoInteresting suggestion, I'll take a look at XMPP and see how that would work. Thanks for the suggestion.
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoRSS would be great as well. Reading HN from Google Reader would be really nice.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joshmanders 15y agoNice Work, I've was working on a service sorta like this for HN but it got put on the back burner for more important projects. Mine is a little different than this, but essentially same idea.
- rkalla 15y agoThanks Josh. If you don't mind sharing, how was your approach different? Maybe there is a hybrid idea in there somewhere that makes better sense that I haven't thought of. What I currently have on the books is to allow following of individuals (e.g. "Every time tbob posts something, let me know!") as well as following New submissions that meet a certain threshold. I know I don't spend enough time ranking new stories, if I could set a base threshold like "New story with at least 5 votes" I would probably participate more. So I figured I would add something like that.
- joshmanders 15y agoBasically the idea behind what I was gonna do was a user can subscribe to certain keywords. The system would than keep track of the /new page and when a new post was made with that keyword, for example: "Apple", it would round it up, and on the next batch of alerts sent out, it'd put that one in the list for that user to be notified of. Had a bunch of other ideas for it too, a long with watching what x user submitted, and even the ability to be notified of "Show HN" and "Ask HN" posts.
- rkalla 15y agoAhh nice, really good ideas. I agree the following notifications are all handy, didn't think about Shown/Ask HN posts, that's a good one. As for keywords, that didn't dawn on me either, another good one. With all these notification settings I can see that a "digest" style email once or twice a day might be the way to go to avoid Google banning me for outbound mail and annoying subscribers.
- joshmanders 15y ago
- mattmiller 15y agoVery cool. Lets see if it works.
- rkalla 15y agoCheck 1-2, check 1-2 :)
- mattmiller 15y agoIt works and it is fast.