What do you think of my project, MeetupMail? | Hacker News Reader

What do you think of my project, MeetupMail?

meetupmail.com

7 pointsjoshholat10 comments

Make "create an account" more obvious and move it up near the top. Maybe make the intro text larger, remove "with meetupmail you can" and add "create an account" after that.

Thanks, I know the splash page needs a lot of work and your suggestions help.

Looks like an interesting project, but you might want to think about rearranging the sales pitch to emphasize what it can do for me that regular email can't. Also some kind of demo of what I'll be able to do after creating an account would be good.

Is this is specifically for the meetup.com website? If it is then I'm not your target audience so ignore me (might be worth making that more obvious). If you are talking about organizing meetups more generally (not tied to meetup,com), then it's not entirely obvious from the front page why I might need it. I don't know why I'd want to add social elements (I can create a link to a map easily enough myself), and the other 3 I can already do.

Does it handle managing who's coming/not coming? Who's replied? Who came last time? I could probably find all of that out by creating an account, but I'm not going to bother doing that unless I already know the answers to those questions.

Hope that helps! Best of luck.

Neat idea, but I couldn't test it out all the way.

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Bad parameters to mail() function, mail not sent. in /home/content/m/a/c/macman012/html/meetupmail/sendhtmlemail.php on line 69

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/m/a/c/macman012/html/meetupmail/sendhtmlemail.php:69) in /home/content/m/a/c/macman012/html/meetupmail/sendhtmlemail.php on line 72

Your 'send email' sends via GET. While that's not necessarily a showstopper, GET is to have no side effects, but you're changing state on the server (assuming you log what I sent).

If you're not already thinking about this, I would strongly suggest more security around the whole project. Sending mails is something that can easily be abused, intentionally or not.

Ahh, I thought I had gotten rid of most of the errors. I'll definitely look into that.

As far as more security, can you elaborate? I added the confirmation email part when you first sign up as one sort of security measure that may stop some spammers. I've thought a lot about security, but I'm not sure how best to implement it or what to all watch for.

As for as database queries go, I've done the work required to check for XSS and MySQL injection and what not.

Replied to your illinois account - didn't want to turn this in to a bug report area. :)

holat1 at illinois dot edu? I haven't gotten any emails yet. I appreciate the discrete bug reporting, though haha

Okay, got it now. Thanks!

Great idea.

Agreed with make "create an account more distinct. Possibly a "Sign up" like http://basecamphq.com/signup

Also the CAPTCHA widget sits on top of the textfields in Firefox.

Ahh yeah, did most of my dev on Chrome and forget to fully cross browser test. Thanks for this.

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