Show HN: ShoutBox – post your secrets, rants and wishes anonymously

by shoutboxgq • 8 years ago

10 8 8 years ago

shoutboxgq4• 8 years ago

For the curious ones, this thing runs on Flask with MongoDB and Consul. I'm using Prometheus to collect some basic metrics and Grafana to visualize them. And yes, I'm going to open source it soon.

mudiaga• 8 years ago

cool app. I'm curious as to what inspired this. and how do you intend to prevent spam since users are posting anonymously.

shoutboxgq4• 8 years ago

This was inspired by apps like DevRant. Problem with those apps is that everything you post is linked to your account. What if you post a story, somebody you know reads it and recognizes you? That person would know all your secrets and shouts.

I wanted to create something where I could post without worries: no accounts, no censorship, automatic expiry (so things don't stay forever and you can have no regrets).

Regarding spam: that's a hard problem for sure. To stop bots, I'm thinking about adding a captcha. To stop spammy humans, there's already a "flag" button below each post. I'm thinking about adding a machine learning module that maybe can learn from the flags and then identify spam automatically. We'll see how it goes. If this thing gains some attraction, I'll surely add moderators from the community around it.

egfx2• 8 years ago

Pretty cool. Like a web version of Whisper. The first thing I wanted to do was comment anonymously. Voting is fine but secondary.

shoutboxgq4• 8 years ago

Yep, commenting is a must-do. I am still not entirely sure how. Having 100% anonymous comments would be cool, sure, but you can't really have a conversation with somebody if you are not sure whether two comments are from the same person or not. I think that commenting will require some sort of identification: to start with, it can be the browser session, in the future I might add the ability to register accounts.

wingerlang• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Tripcodes

shoutboxgq4• 8 years ago

Comments are now implemented!

egfx2• 8 years ago

I would remove the friction of having to put in a nickname. I think you have something here.

Show HN: ShoutBox – post your secrets, rants and wishes anonymously

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