Show HN: CampTarget, road routing and planning helper | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CampTarget, road routing and planning helper

camptarget.com

20 pointsnenadg18 comments

Sounds like a useful product in theory, but chose not to use it because it immediately asked for a location and authentication with Google or Facebook. Why would you need that information right off the bat? I have no incentive to create a profile on your product without getting to try it out first.

Thanks, that seems like major issue so far :]

Ditto that was an insta-close for me as well.

Basically it's an app that should help break your several-day-road-trip by hours that you'll spend each day driving. You can pick some interesting places that you'll like to visit along your way, and soon you'll be able to share this road with others.

It's using Google Maps JavaScript API, some minimal JavaScript on front-end part, and Node + Mongo on backend.

It still has bugs and a lot of things to do, so this would be a beta-preview :).

I would be very happy if you could provide some feedback here :-)

A couple non-starters here for me is the immediate asking for location data and login method. Perhaps you should delay the location request until the user chooses a 'Current Location' option? Otherwise you're asking where I am, but even if I told you, I would still have to give you more information (login) to get anything useful. Regarding login, maybe only require logging in for route saving, or other features. This would allow a user to actually try the app before giving any of this information. Maybe you could have a landing page before the application, to give the user an overview of what it actually does first. Great job on shipping a product!

I agree, I jumped-in to use it, and before I have an idea of value I am asked to login.

However, to me, the real blocker was when I clicked login with Google, it says it was going to provide my age range. Why? What do you want to do with that?

We take name and email and userid, in a really non-malicious attempt to create your future profile. You will be able to opt-out according to GDPR, soon.

Is filling out whatever is in the profile really a source of friction?

That doesn’t quite answer his question. Why is the age range mandatory to create an account via Google? The basic permissions — notably the ID for each user Google will hand back to you — should be sufficient for that purpose.

It is more convenient for us to use Google and Facebook login mechanisms than to create one from the scratch.

We use two methods provided by Passportjs (plus.login and userinfo.email).

I guess one of these asks for age range. You can check their documentation for more details at http://www.passportjs.org/docs/google/.

And for the transparency sake, these are the parts of code on our side.

router.get('/callback', passportGoogle.authenticate('google', { failureRedirect: '/' }), (req, res, next) => { let user = req.user.doc; let userId = user.userid;

    ///
    res.cookie('token', userId, { ...

and this is what is saved to Mongo DB:

var UserSchema = new mongoose.Schema({ name: String, userid: String, email: String, sourcePlatform: String, updated_at: { type: Date, default: Date.now }, });

Hope that helps ;)

Thanks for the response! Transparency is always appreciated.

It looks like the age range is a component of the plus.login scope. You’re not storing any data associated with that scope, so you can instead use the userinfo.email scope (and, possibly, the userinfo.profile scope) to ask for only the information you need.

Okay, good point. Routes are saved automatically, and once we enable some dashboard kind of thingy you'll be able to see all of your previous routes. We thought that this would be cool thing to have once. Thanks a lot.

This sounds like something I would definitely be interested in trying, but I don't have fb/google. Hopefully you can post again when there is some kind of option for email-based logins.

easy to log on w gmail. no issue. but the app only offered to find these attractions along my trip: camping, gas, store, etc.

am i missing something? seems like a great oppty to offer some exciting and unexpected options.

i would love a tool like this if it filled in the blanks with destinations that were new, exciting, unique, etc.

An excellent application for trip planning already exists called 'Furkot' - I've been using it for years - I assume this works slightly differently though and actually suggests interesting places? (didn't try it yet because it asked me to log in before I know what it does)

If by "interesting places" you mean "camp sites, petrol stations, garages, stores and car parks". I would love something that suggests nice view points, road stops, etc. Will check out Furkot.

Another thumbs-up for Furkot. I use it in place of Garmin's infuriating software and just load it on the device when I'm done. It served me well for a multi-week motorcycle trip to Alaska, and a variety of smaller trips to British Columbia and the like. Since every use case is different I won't go on about why I like it, but in summary it is impressively well done.

I'd compare to CampTarget, but like many others the immediate need for my location and creds was an insta-close for me.

From the team that brought you GayWay and MinceRight

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