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Hey gang - this is another self-referential thread. I'm excited to announce that today, Inbound.org is launching publicly. We'd love any help getting out the word and bringing great marketers to the site. I'm also starting this thread to help us gather more feedback, bugs, etc. as the site heats up in quantity of submissions, votes and users. Suggestions are welcome, too. As most of you know, we've tried to keep this launch fairly MVP (Minimum Viable Product) focused, so lots of nifty features didn't make it in yet. We do want to keep a careful eye on people "being cool" here, submitting and voting on good stuff and leaving good comments, though, so any suggestions to help with that are particularly appreciated. p.s. Obviously, the launch did not go so well. We think things are fixed with the login problems now, so hopefully the site can be used again.
Hey, great work guys! Let's do this. Make this community thrive. Everybody join in the fun!
One thing I noticed - we need to ditch shortened URLs for now, or else we'd have to build a system to follow 301s and get the original URL. Otherwise, the short URL shows as the domain, which is totally unhelpful, and it enables a lot of duplicate submissions.
Maybe you can hook into the open-source version of reddit and use their 301 fetch
Not sure I like the gravtar idea. It looks pretty, but I think one great thing about Hacker News is that more ambiguity about who posted/who's commenting means there is less artificial push that's created due to who submitted it. I could see "big names" getting auto upvote favoritism based on their submissions. Which happens and somewhat should happen, but I believe should be minimized. (Meaning that I think just the name works).
I hear you. I think the compromise/decision was based on transparency and the power of identity to keep people honest and authentic. We'll see how it goes, but my general bias is to having the problem you describe vs. one where folks aren't "being cool" thanks to the power of anonymity.
I think the Gravatars (and real names) is a good choice. The bland text-only look of HN, while practical, is pretty boring. I don't think HN is the last word when it comes to these types of sites, I think Inbound's look is refreshing, somewhat exciting; I like it. It'd be great it they could add some other features like highlighting of comments since my last visit.
I see both sides of this. I have to say that having my real name and gravatar makes me proof what I post. Complete anonymity has a way of letting me shoot first and think second.
Congrats on the launch. Now let's make sure comments and submitted articles have quality and adding viewpoints to the discussion
Going public today! Great all the best!!! :)
love the name, the design... awesome work - looking forward to inbound.org
Absolutely hilarious. This is essentially Hacker News for Marketing. A little prettier and faster, but same format. I mean, don't get me wrong. I think it is a great idea and I am going to keep an eye on the site. I just can't believe someone didn't think of this before. Great job, guys.
Great work guys. I'm really looking forward to using the site and watching it grow. I will be writing a blog post about this soon.
"For-fun partnership"? Love it. May that attitude extend out to the rest of us, Inbound.org's growing community of partners.
Really excited to use the site. I'm bettin this community is about to get a little bigger...
This site looks great... awesome it's running on WP too. FYI - the submit url category dropdown seems broken/buggy. Two submits, one in advertising and one in analytics but both got posted to "seo" category... something's weird.
Hey Chuck! I noticed that as well and sent an email to the developer. I bet he gets that fixed up soon.
Sadly, it's something with WPEngine's caching system. In ~15mins, the cache will clear, and the post will be in the correct category - it just shows as wrong initially. Frustrating, and we're working with them to see if there's a way to fix.
This should be fixed as of now. I rolled out a change but please let me know if you see this happening anymore.
Looks cool. Oh ok so that's why I thought I picked the wrong category by accident. Hey are you guys going to add social sharing buttons or something like that?
No plans right now - do you mean on the homepage? Or the posts themselves? Would those buttons share the comments on inbound.org or the original post?
Oh I meant at the post level. So if we like a particular post we can tweet it to share the submission, but not the comments.
Gothca - yeah, we intentionally chose against that, because it creates for a lot of vote manipulation (people linking to submissions to inflate their votes). Obviously, this might happen anyway, and we may need to build what HN has (where direct visits to a submission URL are discounted when people vote, or flagged for manipulation/spam), but for now, we're hoping to at least dissuade this behavior.
One more item I'd suggest/love feedback on - I feel like we should make the "about" a link at the top like Hot | Incoming | Submit. We'd obviously need a graphic for it, but feels like a lot of folks would be helped by an intro to the site... What do you think?
But you have the same on the footer. I think the header links are good the way it is. Concise and to the point.
I think the link in the footer is sufficient in this case. would be a shame to clutter up the top nav. What about doing something a bit more clever, like having a "sticky" topic like you see on forums. The sticky topic could appear only for new users, maybe with an option of 'closing' or 'hiding' the topic? I know you're probably limited by Wordpress a bit, but I'm sure there's a plugin that would do the trick.
how about a one time cookie Hello bar style reveal with link?
May be something like that will be fine at the first time for new users: http://s18.postimage.org/4q3ayagnt/inbound_header.png After creating community "about" link at the top will be excessive. By the way, I think it will be good idea to add images (like screenshots) in comments here :)
I like the idea of moving about from the footer to the header. For a site based on the community and introducing great content to visitors, having the (very friendly) about page visible to newcomers seems natural. It also has the best concise description of what inbound marketing consists of, which will be handy to remember next time I'm trying to explain to my mum what I do for a living... I do also get others comments on keeping the header links as simple as possible - I'd like an icon, but maybe if not it could be text next to login/register?
Inbound.org looks something like digg.com in late 90s :) but it's very good idea, Rand! Thanks for great tool for monitoring a fresh imarketing news!
Thanks a lot Rand ;) It'll be fun to share & vote up SEO knowledge.
This seems to be a great start, Rand! Question: Is there any way you could know whoever is upvoting your post?
Actually, we saw that this has created cabals and vote "favors" in the past (where people feel obligated to vote something up simply b/c something of theirs was voted up). Anonymous seems to work well for HN, so we're sticking with that.
Well, I was just wondering. Thanks for explaining! Way to goooo!
Congratulations Rand :) Love what you have done with Inbound... Great way to find not only new interesting articles but also sources of information, after a while you end-up following the same industry leaders and forgetting that there is a lot being shared by less known but great professionals from who you can learn a lot! Some suggestions for the site: 1. Make it easy to subscribe to RSS feed (visible subscription button with call to action, with a preview of each news piece): I have added Inbound to my Google Reader but for some reason I get a broken image instead of a text preview... 2. Enable a search option: So users can easily find news that include some terms in it. 3. Enable a categorized archive: So users can easily browse trough previously shared articles that are not ranking anymore. 4. Make it easy not only to vote internally on the site each submission, but to share, "tweet", "like" or +1 each one of them by enabling these buttons below each publication. 5. Enable other languages versions for those with critical mass of Inbound marketing content: There is a lot of useful information being published in Spanish, for example, (and I bet that also in other languages) and it would be great to have a "consolidated" source of Inbound Marketing news here. Since you already have already all of the system working well in English and it is UGC, you will only need to translate the structural elements to other languages. Count with me if you want to translate them to Spanish. I bet people from the industry will be happy to help to translate them to their own languages and have a great platform to share. Thank you!
I think the only problem with other languages should be spamming and the need that some inbounder voluntarily act as moderator for those language mirror.
Indeed! The community will also need to help of course :)
Good suggestions Aleyda! 1) Yes - working on this 2) OK - might try to just use a basic Google custom search 3) I believe the archives does precisely this - http://inbound.org/archives/ 4) As I noted below, we probably don't want to do this to limit cabal-voting 5) Interesting... We're probably going to try making this work in English first and if it takes off, possibly branch out to other regions once we reach critical mass. Thanks!
Thank you for the answers Rand! I haven't noticed the archives before... I see that they are only linked from the footer so maybe a good option would be to make the archive's categories more visible, maybe as options of a menu in the header :)
I think we are missing a few categories: PR and Brandng.
Added both!
Yay! That was fast. :)
Hey Rand Great so far good buddy - here's my feature list :-) 1) Missing category: video 2) Can I have an opt in email alert for new items that have received 5 or more votes? 3) Stats and data for each submission from the wider web eg Facebook like / + / Tweet count 4) I don't think it's possible to start a discussion thread. While that might not be the intention for this project, I'd love to see this as a feature, personally 5) A little more information included in the RSS feed would be great (comments?, who submitted, vote count) Looking forward to using our new toy! Thank you!
1) Done! 2) Good idea... We'll try to work on that. 3) That would be cool, but might get expensive (I know for OSE, Moz has to pay for that data and Inbound has no formal budget or revenue) 4) Technically, it's possible to start a discussion thread... But you have to be pretty clever about it :-) 5) Not sure we can do that in RSS (would have to update it frequently), but we can try Thanks Richard! Great to see you here.
Is there any date limitation on what gets submitted? I see lots of new stuff. I see lots of old stuff. I see help pages from Google rather than articles. HN tends to be focused on news stuff, though I don't think they have any rules about how "old" is old etc.
Yeah - we're the same. Just like HN, you can submit something old or new - it's just about what gets the votes. We'll probably have some duplicate issues with people adding ? and # to the ends of URLs, but hopefully can keep an eye on it (and hopefully voters will do a good job weeding out bad/duplicative stuff)
Way to go folks. This is outstanding.
Initial impressions are very positive. I can see this being one of those constantly open windows on my work machine. Well done, let's hope everyone plays nice and makes this work.
Why is not set up for mobile devices?
Will be eventually - as I said, this was an MVP-focused launch.
Congrats, Rand, looks like it's off to a great start!
I support the idea Aleyda Solis on "Enable other languages versions for those with critical mass of Inbound marketing content: There is a lot of useful information being published in Spanish, for example, (and I bet that also in other languages) and it would be great to have a "consolidated" source of Inbound Marketing news here" thank you, and congratulations! Martin from argentina ;)
great idea rand- best of luck
This is pretty slick, A+ Rand!
This is very useful website. Can you please add an "About" page with a small text to the website ?. Then visitors can easily know the purpose of the website. Also people who like to share this website with others on Twitter, Facebook and etc can easily copy that about text share it.
Congrats to Rand and Dharmesh on a inbound.org successful launch. 10K visits in past 24 hours, not too shabby indeed! Since I love SEOMoz and Hubspot, inbound.org is a no-brainer. Just for the record, can anyone confirm that Hubspot coined the term Inbound Marketing? Brilliant!!
can we have a feature to vote down a post-
well, may be its yesterday issue or what, I did submit a SEO tool site but it disappear after a while.. however gonna try it today.. and wanna see the result. :) thankx I think would be grate to have a features in future for getting site downward as well.. :)
I think I removed that link (if it's the one I'm thinking of) because it was clearly self-promotional and did not fit the "be cool" guidelines.
Rand and TM, is there any special reason, we don't have any social share button on page??
Here is a thought. How about a share button that can be added to websites to allow easy submission from a social sharing widget or something of the sort?
Must have feature: saved stories. I want to be able to come back here and check my bookmarks - that's by far the main reason I registered (here, and HN and reddit, digg & the likes). Sure I will submit an item now and then, but my main motivation to upvote thus bookmark a link is being able to come back later and revisit it if I need to.
This is great! I would love to have a place where I can see everything that I have upvoted so I can go back and reference or share the articles that I liked. Right now I go to the article, decide I like it, save it to instapaper, return to inbound.org and upvote.
Yeah - I hear you guys on the "saved stories" ability. We'll look into that as a next-step feature.
We need to have a serious discussion about the Top Members section. While I was initially for it, I forgot about one essential flaw. People are just submitting stuff left & right because they want more karma points, because if they do, they get the privilege of being at the top of the leaderboard. This is causing a lot of submissions with few people actually checking out the content. Again, whether the Top Members section is a good thing or a bad thing, completely accepting it and moving on is something we should avoid. I think this topic, and a few others (such as the "submit to inbound" social button which is popping up) should be heavily discussed, whether it's on a blog, here, or some other platform.
I'm happy with the top members section, I'd probably even take it further and make it more visable, maybe display your rank next your profile image when posting for example. I think the discussion/change needs to be around the Karma calculation which is currently just a count of the upvotes you have recieved. This makes it very tempting (for those that way inclined) to post as high volume of topics in the hope they will get a handful of upvotes to each. If the Karma calculation was along the lines of total upvotes/total articles submitted we may get a better idea of who's providing the best material. Add to that Karma points for flagging and commenting you'd probably have a great metric. Just taking a step back though we are still in the first few days and the site so for is EXCELLENT!
I’m still getting quite a few issues with the site being a little unresponsive at the moment, logging in and opening comments seem to be timing out quite often for me (maybe 30% of the time)
great place to get stuck with SEO stuffs
Here's an idea for submissions - why manually submit? For high karma users, it would be amazing to have auto-submission based on their twitter shares. Let's say I tweet an inbound article, with the hashtag #inbound. As I'm registered, and have high karma, the article gets automatically submitted to inbound.org. Obviously there are (easy to spot) problems with this idea, but none that I can see can't be fixed with a little validation (eg, gets RT'd by another high Karma user) Discuss...
I like the idea. It requires development (both of the community maturing to find these high karma users and actual dev work), but over time, could be very cool. Thanks Richard!
Glad to see the site launched! Looks like you have a great community of folks already.
Congratulations Rand love what you have done with Inbound
This shit website is not working.It gives me this error- URL Does Not Render A Correct Status Code