Ask HN: Feedback on my newest project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324613

by symbiotic • 16 years ago

5 9 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

One of my friends is an avid hunter and fisherman. He had the idea for a social network for hunters and fisherman to share pictures. I'd love HN's feedback on the idea and the current implementation!

symbiotic4• 16 years ago

Clickable link: http://trophysight.com

icey3• 16 years ago

I think the idea is pretty cool, but why do you need so much information (first name, last name, email address, birthday)?

If you just required a username and a password, and then made everything else optional, I think you'd get a lot more signups.

I didn't feel like giving you all that information so I didn't bother creating a login... but if you haven't done it already have you considered adding voting to the pictures? This would be a perfect use-case for the new Facebook "Like" buttons. Thinking about it, maybe Facebook connect would be a good idea as well.

[Edit: You may want to do something better for your privacy policy if you are going to require all this information. Big blocks of "lorem ipsum" text aren't very confidence inspiring. You may also want to change the "you're bound by the ToS when you register" text until you actually have some terms of service.]

symbiotic4• 16 years ago

We do need birthday because you have to be at least 13 to register but you're right about the rest, especially the TOS... going to fix that now :)

icey3• 16 years ago

You may want to look in to FB Connect, I think it will solve a lot of those issues for you.

binarymax• 16 years ago

I really dig your profile slider on the trophy board! Is that a plugin you used or something you hand coded?

symbiotic4• 16 years ago

That was hand coded. It took me forever to get it working in IE6 :)

hga• 16 years ago

I was brought up in a family of avid hunters and fishermen (although I find fishing boring and prefer target shooting over hunting), and here are some things you might want to add:

Size.

Weight.

Distance for hunting.

More details on gear used.

The place where the game was caught in addition to the home town of the sportsman.

On question here is do you want to do this free form, with perhaps some suggestions to the user, and then have to police abuses (e.g. anything that passes a profanity filter) and have things look a bit irregular, or do you want to try to limit and regularize the inputs?

If the latter, type of lure or load would get onerous and would get really obnoxious for handmade flies, hand loads, etc.

And then there's people like my father who has about 2 12 gauge hand loads he uses for his Browning Auto-5s, for small (dove and quail) and medium (grouse and pheasant) upland birds. If he were the type to put up pictures like this, I'm sure he'd prefer being able to pick from those few options (no drop down lists though!) rather than entering the details each time (I'm sure he wouldn't bother to do the latter).

And, yeah, the profile slider is very nice.

Good luck!

Ask HN: Feedback on my newest project

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