Show HN: HN Notify - Email reply notifications for comments and posts.

by rkalla • 15 years ago

32 38 15 years ago

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Really been enjoying the HN community and wanted to contribute this back to help keep people engaged in the conversations they are involved in even as those comments and replies are pushed down the page.

For anyone interested, this is written with:

  - Play! Framework 1.2.3
  - MongoDB 1.8.3
  - jQuery (minor, I am not a UI guy)

When you signup, it more or less adds a flag in the DB that you want emails when someone replies to you (whether it is a story reply or a comment reply) and when you unsubscribe it removes that flag. No stray account info or history is kept.

Thanks goes out to the HN community for a hell of a lot of great information and I hope you guys find this handy.

jeffehobbs• 15 years ago

Neat! Thanks for this!

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

It seems that I can pretend to be someone else and get notified every time they get replied to. You could offer protection against that by asking that a long, semi-random string be placed in the profile of the person registering.

I've registered, and I'll be watching with interest to see if it changes my relationship with the site.

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Colin, quick find.

When I originally launched the beta I didn't include this functionality, but had a friend ask for it right away and it dawned one me that it might not be that uncommon for one HN user wanting to watch the interaction another user is having regularly (e.g. following 'pg' or 'patio11' conversations).

Only because the information is public I figured "sure, why not" and added it.

Although it occurs to me that the more appropriate feature might be a "Watch this user" type of signup which I would be happy to add down the road if people really wanted it.

When you unsubscribe, the site will unsub you from every user account the email address you entered is watching, so you don't have to undo each one individually.

pwaring• 15 years ago

Is that a big problem? Replies are public, so signing up as another user is not leaking any private data.

genieyclo• 15 years ago

Replies are all public anyways. Besides, hackerstream.com let you do this with multiple people long before.

akkartik• 15 years ago

There's a distinction between getting notified when multiple people comment, and when they get responses. Is the latter useful at all?

Urgo2• 15 years ago

Cool I just signed up. Thanks for creating this. Someone reply here so I can test it :)

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Very welcome!

Urgo2• 15 years ago

Nice, it works :)

troels3• 15 years ago

What does this provide that notifo doesn't?

rkalla11• 15 years ago

My friendship.

Seriously though, I haven't used notifo before so I don't know. It looks like a great service though.

troels3• 15 years ago

Haha .. OK. When you go to your profile here on HN, there is a field where you can enter your notifo user name.

doctoboggan• 15 years ago

Notifo is shutting down.

mdoerneman• 15 years ago

Notifo will be shutting down. See here: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

troels3• 15 years ago

Oh .. Didn't realise. That's sad news.

bvi• 15 years ago

On a related note - why is notifo still on the new user registration?

simonbrown• 15 years ago

Shouldn't it confirm email addresses before subscribing or unsubscribing people?

acangiano• 15 years ago

In Canada it's a legal requirement. In the US, it's not, but it's still a very good idea to do so.

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

Didn't know about Canada - thanks!

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Yes absolutely it should, I'll add it shortly.

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

I could troll someone by signing them up to follow, well, everyone. That could be a problem, couldn't it?

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Right now, yes it could... please don't do that :)

I'll add an email verification step soon.

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

I think just requiring them to put a magic string in their profile would be fairly robust. Yes, it's another step, but I think everything requires an extra step. You just need to choose what that step will be.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

I'm concerned about this as well. As someone who has their email on their profile, I'm afraid of pissing someone off and getting the troll treatment.

pixdamix• 15 years ago

Would it be possible to add XMPP support ? Then the service could check my XMPP status and postpone notifications if i'm away, busy, offline...

I tend to prefer IM for this kind of things as it doesn't clutter my mailbox.

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Interesting suggestion, I'll take a look at XMPP and see how that would work. Thanks for the suggestion.

DanielRibeiro• 15 years ago

RSS would be great as well. Reading HN from Google Reader would be really nice.

joshmanders4• 15 years ago

Nice Work, I've was working on a service sorta like this for HN but it got put on the back burner for more important projects. Mine is a little different than this, but essentially same idea.

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Thanks Josh. If you don't mind sharing, how was your approach different? Maybe there is a hybrid idea in there somewhere that makes better sense that I haven't thought of.

What I currently have on the books is to allow following of individuals (e.g. "Every time tbob posts something, let me know!") as well as following New submissions that meet a certain threshold.

I know I don't spend enough time ranking new stories, if I could set a base threshold like "New story with at least 5 votes" I would probably participate more.

So I figured I would add something like that.

joshmanders4• 15 years ago

Basically the idea behind what I was gonna do was a user can subscribe to certain keywords. The system would than keep track of the /new page and when a new post was made with that keyword, for example: "Apple", it would round it up, and on the next batch of alerts sent out, it'd put that one in the list for that user to be notified of. Had a bunch of other ideas for it too, a long with watching what x user submitted, and even the ability to be notified of "Show HN" and "Ask HN" posts.

mattmiller2• 15 years ago

Very cool. Lets see if it works.

rkalla11• 15 years ago

Check 1-2, check 1-2 :)

mattmiller2• 15 years ago

It works and it is fast.

Show HN: HN Notify - Email reply notifications for comments and posts.

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