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Comment by nexthash | Hacker News Reader

Haha, I've built something similar to this before as a student project! Except I've described it as a 'shareable index card'. Check it out here: http://drop-info.live/

Two pieces of advice for you if you are intending to take this to market. I suggest writing/investing in some good moderation tools to prevent spammers and other undesirables from using your site for illegal stuff. Also, get yourself a lawyer and write terms of service to protect your project from liability.

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Thanks for the advice nexthash. It is something that's been concerning me, and is one of the reasons I'm not currently allowing embedded images in posts -- I don't want to have to deal with hosting pornography and all the pains that come with that.

Shady content, potential copyright infringements, it's a can of worms all right.

What about libel?

Allow audio uploads and you can deal with slander, too!

Yep, and also linking to other websites can be an issue, like phishing, porn, malware, etc. It is a very big can of worms but from my experience the second spammers discover your site it becomes their new home base and will get your domain blacklisted pretty quickly.

Did you find solutions to that yourself with your own app?

Personally my project never was the type to require such vigilance - 'content moderation' consisted of sshing into the server and deleting any objectionable posts directly. The factor you have to consider is shareability - the links are private, but if they are shared enough they might put your site under scrutiny. Never mattered for me, if anything I would just take my project offline and reset it. A while back there was a fruitful discussion about this topic for a new link-sharing service, and could give you some pointers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504

A quick skim reveals some link-filtering services and libraries do exist, such as:

http://uribl.com/ https://www.spamhaus.org/

Good luck!

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