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Comment by tomcreighton | Hacker News Reader

Have you thought about relaunching after a redesign? What you just outlined as the idea behind the site sounds great... so I visited the site and was hit with off-putting text (the 'voice' of the site doesn't work for me), spelling errors and no clear indication what the site was FOR.

So: idea really good (to my mind), execution: needs some polish.

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Please ignore the front page for now. It was some crazy test we did for some purpose. Did you sing-in and check it?

Why are you doing 'crazy tests' on your live front page? You should have a staging site for that.

We were expecting some traffic from a source, tried targeting them with that those tests.

That source is HN. :)

I did, and I maintain that the idea is good, and parts of the design are really well-realized, but it still needs some attention.

I shouldn't have to sign up and sign in to check it out. A 'public' forum page so that you can just check it out (see what people have posted) would go a long way. 95%+ of people who use things like HN and Reddit are lurkers (I consider myself primarily a lurker). From what I can tell, it is a redding/hn clone just by looking at the landing page. (Possibly with enhancements, but who knows).

Basically, I want to know what I'm signing up for that is half the problem. So it isn't clear what it does.

It also isn't clear how sign in works. There is a button and it looks like I need to type in a user name and password, but there is no username or password field. Should be top right, above the button that you have.

If you really think that you have 'solved' online forums, why not market it to a larger audience? Offer free public and pay-for private forums, or use ads.

I started to have a look, but I don't see a way to preview the content of the site without creating an account. I don't know of many online discussion forums that follow this pattern. HN, Stack Overflow, and even Experts Exchange allow you some sort of access to the community (read-only) prior to signing up.

Experts Exchange is actually a great case study in the distrust engendered by walling off your content behind a sign-up requirement. Stack Overflow has taken off like a rocket. I can browse every bit of user contributed content on their site without creating an account. Experts Exchange has a sizable community of people who actively dislike them. I think SO has the better model.

I would add that I normally wouldn't be inclined to create an account, given the current state of your homepage. It's not doing a good job of selling me on your service.

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