Show HN: HN Notify - Email reply notifications for comments and posts. | Hacker News Reader

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

hnnotify.com

32 pointsrkalla38 comments

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.

Neat! Thanks for this!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ahh nice, really good ideas.

I agree the following notifications are all handy, didn't think about Shown/Ask HN posts, that's a good one. As for keywords, that didn't dawn on me either, another good one.

With all these notification settings I can see that a "digest" style email once or twice a day might be the way to go to avoid Google banning me for outbound mail and annoying subscribers.

Yep, that's a good idea. I've also thought about even allowing users to subscribe to domains. Want to keep an eye on new TechCrunch articles posted? Subscribe to techcrunch.com and that will also be put into your notifications.

Best way to handle all this in my opinion would be user accounts, and I know you probably had the same thing in mind when I started mine. No accounts, just put an email in, and a keyword and let them input as many as they wanted.

Yea exactly right, I didn't want to go down that every-notification path because it would make everything more complicated to use.

Also, another user in this thread made me aware of http://notifo.com/ which I think does the every-notify already.

I really just wanted to help out HN users specifically, not really a startup I had in mind. So I'll keep the features paired down to services you good folks :)

If I remember correctly, notifo.com is shutting down.

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

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.

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

I'll add an email verification step soon.

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.

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

Very welcome!

Nice, it works :)

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

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

Didn't know about Canada - thanks!

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

What does this provide that notifo doesn't?

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

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

Notifo is shutting down.

My friendship.

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

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

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

Very cool. Lets see if it works.

Check 1-2, check 1-2 :)

It works and it is fast.

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