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Comment by foxhop | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, sorry about that. I hope nobody gets flagged for NSFW.

I'll have to rethink the recent image on the right.

If you don't mind me asking, what did you need this service for a year ago? I'm still trying to fit the proper market.

You don't need the most up to date 'recent images'. Toss them in a folder for manual review, and check a couple once an hour, or even less frequently.

Or crowdsource image reviews

I really don't think all that trouble is necessary. A particular user is probably only going to see the homepage once or twice before creating an account, so even just hand-picking 5 images and rotating between them with JavaScript is probably plenty.

I actually built a service like this for internal use a couple of years ago.

I worked at an agency, we were responsible for the web sites of companies of which many were listed at various exchanges. This included handling the publication of press releases. The exchange rules are pretty strict, if a press release is leaked early, you are in a world of hurt. If you publish it too late, you are in a world of hurt. The fines could be draconian in nature.

This led to inane publication work flows, where literally nothing would be allowed to touch anything that could somehow be connected to the internet. The press releases are handed to us in encrypted form. The publication is prepared one day in advance, and at 5am a couple of poor souls have to show up at the office and publish them before the exchange opens, they also have to trigger newsletters. They also had to take print screens of every change they made and file them in a folder.

Because our clients could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for mistakes, among other things, I created an automated screen shot service that regularly takes screen shots of certain areas on the client web pages and also downloads the associated html source. External guys audited the application. This is basically just a precaution so that no client can claim we somehow accidentally leaked unwanted information. It's also there to prove that we managed to publish everything in time.

Now of course, once you have something like this in place, someone has to monitor it to make sure it works all the time :) lol...

I thought at first it was some sort of service for porn sites! Porn companies need service providers too...

I think it was for one of my clients that has a directory service for green service providers in Ontario (http://www.greatgreendirectory.ca/Group/Windfall-Ecology-Cen...). For any sort of directory it would be useful to show the website linked to.

I have a porn site as a client, and it would actually be very useful for them.

There are a lot (dozens to hundreds) of generated gallery-style landing pages for affiliates to choose to send traffic to, and having thumbnails of the pages automatically generated would make it much easier for the affiliates to browse through them and pick the ones they want to use.

Out of respect, I'll wait until it doesn't show the latest thumbnails on the homepage before pitching it to my client. :)

I've created my own service like this. The goal was to provide an archive of images for clients, showing their website's content over time and 'proof' of this or that. The setup involved a system to create VNC/xvfb screens, which ran a real browser and created a snapshot further processed with imagemagick. This required a bit of a larger VPS than I would have needed otherwise. There was some overhead and complexity. I researched the systems available at the time, and most of them were either too expensive or inadequate (i.e. only provided thumbnails, and we needed full size snaps).

You could run through the sites you grab the thumbnails from and take an educated guess if they should be shown or not.

Most adult sites have an rta meta tag. You can use that along with Alexa and scraping the keywords + domain name for usual suspect text fragments. Might help block out those horrific images that cant be unseen..

Otherwise, love this service and I'm pretty sure I'll be using it

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