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Hey gang, Thanks so much for participating in the beta of Inbound.org. I'm starting this thread to help gather final feedback on the changes/work to date and what's still remaining that you'd like to see. As I noted last time, we're planning the public launch as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and don't have a ton of dev time/energy to devote, but if there are bugs or critical missing features, we definitely want to know. We also wanted to bring up the issue of spam, manipulation and trolling. Obviously, these are things that could quickly destroy this site, but so far (likely thanks to the devotion of all of you to being cool) hasn't been a big issue. Suggestions about what to do here are invited and appreciated. Finally, we'd love your help in spreading the word about Inbound.org when the public launch happens (might be as early as this Sunday or Monday). Tweets, +1s, Shares and blog posts are all more than welcome. Thanks much! Rand (and Casey/Dharmesh, too)
I'd like to be able to click on my name in the right top corner and to end up on my profile. There I'd like to see my submissions, my comments and my votes ideally. Also some kind of notifications would be great. It's really difficult to follow discussions right now.
Everything Tad said :) Thanks guys. This site looks to have great potential. Will absolutely share when it goes public.
I think we can definitely get the link to function. We've been having a harder time get all the submissions/comments/votes to show there, but may be able to get some of those. In terms of notification - do you mean an email when there's a reply to a thread? Or when something reaches the homepage?
I would personally rather a homepage notification. I'm sure others would appreciate an email. Maybe give both options?
Notification doesn't have to be a mail each time. Moving the thread to the top of my page would be enough I guess. Doesn't HN do this? I don't remember exactly as they banned me back in 2009.
Uh-oh. You're scaring me Tad :-) We'll see what's possible here. In chatting offline, this is one of the more difficult features to build, so it might have to wait and be a post-launch improvement.
You can look the reason for the ban up. My comments are still online, they just deleted all of my submissions as some kind of weird retaliation: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=onreact-com This is the thread I got banned for I guess, I dared to criticize banks in a venture capitalist community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841480 Anyways, the point of mentioning HN here was that I thought the software HN and Inbound uses has build in comment collection and highlighting by moving up but maybe they customized it later as well. So take your time, no hurry. I'm staying here.
I'm unclear on what changes have been made to date, what's in the works, and what's been suggested by users that you're considering *or* aren't interested in. There's a lot from the beta feedback thread that I haven't seen responded to: - Lots of issues with categories. Category bugs, difficulty finding the right category, suggestions that for now we scrap categories. - Comment functionality. Editing, deleting, sorting, collapsing, notification. You've said email notifications would be really difficult -- is there an on-site solution that might be easier? Even if it's just listing on our profile pages where we've commented so we can check for replies. - Page links formatting. Title truncation, too much space between links, need for visited-link style. All of the above are things mentioned by at least two people, receiving several upvotes (4 still seems to be above-average at the moment), that didn't have replies from Casey, Dharmesh, or Rand (except one of the notifications). I totally get that all three of you are very busy; the people providing feedback are too. Letting them know it's been heard, at the least, is one of the best ways to keep them providing it. If this site is going to succeed, it will need a strong core community of active users. Being communicative about the progress being made will help us feel part of it.
Hi Jay - yes, sorry about that. Definitely hear you and will try to be better about responding. One of my reasons for opening this thread is to help revisit those issues for folks who may not be going back to the old, buried thread on feedback topics. In terms of categories - we're planning to keep them. I'll try to go through the other thread and find any suggested categories that are missing and feel critical. Can you detail the "category bugs?" I know there was a bug where selecting one category would populate another, but I *think* that's been fixed (will test again). Comment functionality - yeah, it's a work in progress. Casey's trying to get them to show up on your profile. Editing/deleting should be something we can do; we'll look into that. Page Link Formatting - spacing's going to be hard to mess with at this point given the design, but truncation may be addressable as might visited-link style. Much appreciated.
Awesome. re: category bugs, everything (initially?) appearing as "SEO" was the main one I saw. Looking forward to the launch and thereafter!
I'm working with WP Engine to solve the category issue as it seems to be a caching issue. After the page is recached the category displays correctly. Looking in the database the correct category is assigned to the article it's just not refreshing until the cache is refreshed. I'll keep you all updated.
I'm guessing this has already been addressed and I'm just unaware, but how the heck do I change my About section on my profile? I know it's populated from my twitter bio but is there any way to change it on this site?
Good call - we should enable editing there. I'll see what can be done.
It'd be great to fill out the profile much more. For example, comments have our twitter display images. Would these be able to be fed into our about section? Be great to have a place for our other Websites, Social Media Accounts etc too.
Are there people or a system in place to handle spam once this opens up to the public? You're absolutely right Rand, this could kill the site. I noticed one thread that went up to test the flagging system. That post seemed to stay at the top of "hot" even though it had been flagged. Maybe that has been changed/resolved? It seems like this needs to be put to the test more, and perhaps at a higher volume. There should be some mock (maybe even unannounced?) spamming done on purpose to test what its going to more like in reality once the site opens up. Thoughts? -Dan PS - I do LOVE the site :-)
Yeah - good point. We're working on making the algo recognize flags and prevent things from going hot if they have too high a ratio of flags/upvotes (or something like that). Our goal is to launch on Thursday/Friday of this coming week, so we'll have to start testing soon. Anyone who wants - please do submit some crap/spam and let's see if the rest of us can be responsible about flagging. We also should institute a rule that flagging cannot/should not be used for things with which you disagree or just don't like - only for actual spam/stuff that doesn't belong.
OK - I DM'd Casey, but so you know, you will likely see some weird submissions come in from me. -Dan
Hey Rand - iI think a good feature would be to have a personalised front page where you can hide articles from appearing. A feature like hypem.com's "<3" favouring would be great for saving things for later reading. Apologies if either are already implemented - I've only viewed this site on my iPad so may not be able to see it. -Will
What about adding a comment field to the bookmarklet? Maybe even populate that comment field based on what I had highlighted on the page. If engagement (and commenting in particular) is a goal, breaking through that 0 comments wall is important. Call it social proof or just tearing off that first strip from a flyer, I think it might help. Of course, pointing more people at the site might solve that problem too ;) Have you opened it up yet Rand?
I was wandering the same thing as AJ. Since there is constantly new content on this site people could be less inclined to be the first person to leave a comment. Would it be better to focus on "comments" instead of "up votes" and maybe putting the up vote inside the comments field.
Encouraging comments is important but I'd rather limit submissions so that people have to comment first before they can dump a dozen links on us. Common sense limitations: No submission allowed for new users below a karma of 20. No submission of the same site twice in a row. No submission by a person of more than 3 stories in a row. No self submission of your won URL. To detect voting rings: Counts votes, people who only appear, vote for just one story and disappear get discounted.
Hey Rand, is there a system in place to handle duplicate URLs/posts? If not, then maybe a great feature to consider would be where if someone tries to submit a URL that's already been posted on the site, one of the following can happen: 1. Site just tells the submitter that the URL is already there and ask for a new URL. 2. Site directs the submitter to the URL/article that already exists and ask the person to vote instead. Just thought I throw this one out there because duplicate posts could be an issue in the future as the site grows. One last thing- I hope there will be a way to manage your comments. (Ie. edit/delete comments, etc.)
Scratch this. Just tested this one myself and looks like the feature I mentioned is already there. RAD!
Hi Rand, I think I've just found a "bug" in the submission system. In fact, I submitter the "Alfred Hitchcock SEO copy" post by Portent under the category Content, and it was published without problems. Just after I noticed it was already posted but under the category SEO. So... would not the system detect it?
I flagged spam x2 yesterday but it did not seem to have any discernible effect within 24 hours. I can still see it "shipthecash". Does flagging only work when someone else flags?
Infinte scroll instead of pagination? I know that is a challenge because you'd have to shift the slim footer to the side and get heavy on the jquery. The footer content has scope for trimming imo eg Hottest=Hot, Top Members=Inbounders (?) Login/Register=Sign Up Guidelines=Rules. RSS & Twitter can be icons. About & blurb below can merged. may I stick my neck out some more? Less is more. So "Upvotes" can be just be "votes" (you cannot down vote anyhow). I don't even think you need the word "Comments" adjacent to the count as the icon suffices. The "Submitted x hours ago" can also be more muted in size and colour.