Show HN: HNNotify – Get emailed when a users reply to your HN Posts and Comments

by jermaustin1 • 9 years ago

66 65 9 years ago

jermaustin114• 9 years ago

Hey guys, I built this out of a desire to get emailed when people respond to me on HN. Too often I would comment, go out to dinner and forget to check back. Now, I will know within an hour or so if someone commented!

lobster_johnson• 9 years ago

I use hnreplies.com, and it works pretty well. But it goes through periods of not working at all.

The problem with these services (there also used to be one called hnnotify.com, which didn't last long) is that they're developed by HN users, who don't seem to care enough to keep the services working 100%.

YC seems to prefer a development model where the community fills in the gaps of missing functionality, but this also means you can't expect much from the resulting services. I would much rather have this built into HN.

azhenley3• 9 years ago

I'd prefer it to be builtin too. Just a number beside my username in the top right, that when clicked, takes me to a list of comments and submissions that have been commented on.

jermaustin114• 9 years ago

I'd love this built in. It would work better than anything I could create!

But until a feature like that exists, I'll stick with mine.

krapp• 9 years ago

YC seems to prefer a development model where the community fills in the gaps of missing functionality, but this also means you can't expect much from the resulting services. I would much rather have this built into HN.

I would prefer the best of both worlds - let users write plugins that consume a more robust version of the API and add that functionality themselves. They could even be posted publicly and integrated by other users with some arbitrary amount of karma, and plugins would necessarily be restricted in their capabilities and maybe even rate limited.

Heck, add an endpoint for a WASM compiler and an option to use multiple languages.

It will never happen, though.

foodstances• 9 years ago

HN used to natively support sending push notifications through Notifo, but that company folded and the feature went away.

I guess one of these HN-comment-e-mailing websites needs to apply to YC to actually have a chance of getting integrated into the site.

ekianjo2• 9 years ago

Can you confirm you don't plan to use the email addresses for any other purpose? It should be indicated on the page.

jermaustin114• 9 years ago

I will add that to the home page. Does this sound good?

I have no intention on using the emails for anything but notifications from HNNotify. Included in that are: new features, account notifications, reply notifications, follower notifications (future).

Your email will never be used to solicit/sell anything 3rd party.

zhan_eg• 9 years ago

Hey, just FYI - on both Firefox/Chrome with uBlock the main content is hidden, because of ##.newsletter-subscribe (part of Fanboy’s Annoyance List, not enabled by default, but still)

azhenley3• 9 years ago

I've been using this for about a week now. It's exactly what I was looking for: a simple notification that reminds me to go read my comments.

ColinWright4• 9 years ago

There used to be http://hnnotify.com - but that seems to have expired. I'm guessing you already searched for other options before building your own?

For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6499036

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004254

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837059

Those discussions mention some legitimate concerns about a service like this that you might want to consider.

It has also gone down before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521491

No idea if the current outage is permanent - did you ask them?

Are you offering any long-term guarantees of existence?

Show HN: HNNotify – Get emailed when a users reply to your HN Posts and Comments

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