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Show HN: Tampon - an open source Buffer app

tamponapp.com

33 pointsjulien_c85 comments

Terrible name, you should definitely change it. It might get you attention and have some shock value at the start but it's going to look stupid eventually (if it doesn't already). Same goes for the logo. I understand it's 'buffer' in French but major companies go out of their way to ensure their product name translates well in the major languages. You should too.

Apart from that, it seems like a good product.

EDIT: Another reason to rename - If I'm on a shared computer I don't want 'tampon' all over the internet history.

As stated some place else: it's an open source project, so let's just have fun with names! :)

You have a right to name it what you want. If you have goals related to other people using, forking, improving, etc, then this name will make that harder.

For example, in Showing to HN, you probably wanted some frank feedback. Your name is working against that as all you are getting is discussion of the name. If that's what you wanted -- well, mission accomplished.

As a meta-comment, the obvious should be pointed out: by creating shock value, the name creates discussions, which create upvotes, which drives more traffic to the post hence leads to more feedback.

Call it "growth hacking" if you want, but the name is quite smart in that respect.

I only see evidence of one kind of feedback, which, I hope, was expected, so it's not very useful.

It's not growth hacking if you don't grow something you care about (e.g. users not "naming" discussions).

"Call it 'growth hacking' if you want, but the name is quite smart in that respect."

Traffic != use, in roughly the same way that gawking at an accident != first aid.

Naming is hard, and I appreciate the desire to have fun with a name. It's pretty clear from the responses that this particular joke doesn't work.

Looking past the name, it looks like a well-constructed useful app and you should be proud of it.

>>it's going to look stupid eventually (if it doesn't already)

It already does.

>>I understand it's 'buffer' in French but major companies go out of their way to ensure their product name translates well in the major languages. You should too.

This product was clearly named with the intention of being provocative. The logo is clear evidence of that.

My first thought was "With a name like that, won't people be a little embarrassed to say they're using it?"

Then I realized I need to grow up, as I wouldn't have batted an eye if it were called Jock Strap or something inherently male in nature.

Bit of a disconnect between the "meaning" of the name and the logo, but again, part of this may boil down to my own level of discomfort/unfamiliarity with products that women make use of on a day to day basis.

Or maybe the person who made it is intentionally going for something that will cause discomfort and discussion, to further spread awareness of his product.

tl;dr; Things that initially make us uncomfortable may end up revealing a little something about ourselves.

I doubt people are outraged. I know for myself, I don't care what he wants to do. I just think he should rename it if he wants to be taken seriously.

Well, it's an open source project, not a whole company, right?

As I said, call it whatever you want, I'm not outraged. Simply put: it's up to you if this project is something you want to put on your resume or Linkedin and be taken seriously,

Or associated with your other github projects...oh, wait.

I wouldn't have batted an eye if it were called Jock Strap or something inherently male in nature

Really? I would totally cringe at something called "Jock Strap" or "scrotum" or "foreskin".

Tampon isn't just a feminine word like "flower" or "butterfly", it's biological and personal. "Anal Probe" is gender-neutral neutral term that also feels inappropriate because of its personal and biological nature.

I feel like your counter examples were fairly over the top.

He didn't name it "Labia" or "Clitoris", he named it after a product that females use for hygienic purposes. I can't really think of a particular brand of male-genital-hygiene products off the top of my head (that aren't also used in other areas, ie: hair trimmers or washes), so I went with something as similar as I could that served a single unique purpose.

I'm not saying I'd see a product named Jock Strap and say "Wow, that's a great name!". My point was, the initial shock value of the name wore off once I realized I wasn't in the third grade anymore and it was just the name of a product that ~50% of the worlds population makes use of on a regular basis. A shock value that would not have been there for me had the name been something like Jock Strap, which would be a product that I'd be more comfortable making quips and jokes about.

Also, "Flower" and "Butterfly" are feminine words now?

I totally see your point. There aren't any, that I know of, male-specific genital hygiene products.

Flowers and butterflies, as cultural concepts, tend to correlate with femininity more than rocketships and monster trucks. I was trying to think of a non-biological example of something that's perfectly OK to use.

"There aren't any, that I know of, male-specific genital hygiene products."

And isn't this the REAL injustice?!

Male soap. Male wet-wipes.

So, I never got as far as looking at the app cos the name made me shudder at the potential for similar behaviour underneath the surface.

How about Spermacide or Condom? They're gender-specific and inherently sexual (as in, pertaining to sex organs). We're not in the third grade, you're right. But apparently the author of this app is. If he's not behaving seriously, he can't expect to be taken seriously.

The reason to be okay with this name is because you have a third-grade sense of humor. The reason to not be okay with it is because you're mature and the author is not.

in my experience "not being okay" with something is rarely a sign of maturity, and certainly never when the something is the name of an open source app.

Am I the only one that checked to see if analprobe.com was registered?

I wouldn't bother, but if you're willing to use two-letter country code domains, you might be able to get http://analprob.es

Scrotwm is an open source Linux window manager.

I'm struggling to think of too many other examples - "Back Orifice" was a script kiddie tool from about a decade ago, I guess that was a "provocative" name (iirc, it had a plugin system called "buttplugs", but I may have imagined that).

Question to the people who are objecting to the name: would you object to a punk band that called itself "Tampon"? Would you say things like "this will really harm adoption of your product"? If not, what do you consider to be the relevant distinction between open source software and punk music?

Tampon is a great name for a punk band. There's an all-mom punk band here in Seattle called "the Kegels" and people love them.

I usually say that people should be as edgy and experimental as they want on their own time. A serious product or workplace should have a different standard of decorum.

>> Question to the people who are objecting to the name: would you object to a punk band that called itself "Tampon"? Would you say things like "this will really harm adoption of your product"? If not, what do you consider to be the relevant distinction between open source software and punk music?

By punk standards, 'Tampon' would be a relatively boring and unimaginative name. However, aren't we comparing apples to oranges?

I used to play in a punk band, during which time I sported a very respectable mohawk. I also wore tweed jackets from the salvation army, moshed and drank aggressively and cursed profusely.

As great fun as that was, I wouldn't do either of these things in a place-that-I-code. Not in a co-working space, not at a coffee shop, and certainly not in my place of employment.

I'm a woman, and I think this needs to be renamed (and given a new logo, stat). Not because tampons make me uncomfortable, but because it seems like a cheap ploy to get attention, and it makes it more difficult for me to take the app seriously on its own merits.

I also agree it makes it harder to take the app on its own merits with a name that seems like such an obvious attention grab.

My point was mainly one of self reflection

I'm not a woman, and I agree. It just opens the door for lame, offensive jokes and doesn't have anything to do with the project. There probably was no negative intent, but it should be renamed.

Terrible name, and a service built on Twitter, which has already come out and said they're going to squash essentially any service that infringes on their trademarks.

Which trademarks are you refering to here?

"Tampon means Buffer in French :)"

I guess the logo transfers as well.

Maybe it's French flowchart notation for a buffer too ;-)

Tweets are now menstrual blood. Tampon helps you stock up on them.

Yeah. It's pretty unambiguous, and the pun isn't really that funny IMHO. Maybe it's because I do this stuff for a living now, but I don't like the idea of using either "Tampon", "Douche" or "Suppository" in my products.

On the flipside, I'm sure opting for a potentially inflammatory name has attracted attention that they otherwise wouldn't have received.

What is sad is the fact that this is a pretty useful app, yet most of the discussion is about the name. I would like to see more discussion about the app itself, but that could be just me.

I personally couldn't care less what people name the projects that they work on during their free time. However, when you choose to name your project something ridiculous like Tampon, then there should be little surprise when people focus on the ridiculous name. That's how people are.

There's always the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the name is the most interesting part about the project.

Sure, it's useful -- in fact, I really need to schedule tweets, but have been procrastinating in finding one. This post made me do the 3 second google search and I chose http://twuffer.com -- not a great name, but free, easy and has the features I need.

There are a ton of products (free and commercial) that do this -- but only one had a name that made me not even want to find out if it would be useful to me. No comment on this page discussed anything about whether it was good (in fact the non-name comments I see are negative) -- my guess is that, like me, no one is really giving it a serious look.

I think it's legitimate to factor this reaction into your naming strategy.

Thanks for the link, I haven't really looked into it too much, I appreciate you sharing your findings.

I also signed up for Buffer, which has a really nice Chrome extension that adds "Add to Buffer" to some popular sites, including HN.

Rename it.

Why?

Carrie.

Agreed. You wouldn't be the first - Enron's first logo apparently looked like an obscene gesture in Italy even though it was perfectly acceptable in the states, so they changed it. Also, apparently they were originally called 'Enteron', but that approximated a Greek word referring to the intestines.

So, in short, if your market is global (and it is), try and go with a word that doesn't have any additional connotations in most languages, especially English, which a lot of your target audience will be using as a primary language.

Why not take a page from 'Enteron' and shorten it... 'Tam' or 'Tamp'?

The logo makes it clear that the connotations are no accident...

And people joked that Apple was hinting at feminine hygiene products when it first announced the "iPad"

Great app, happy to see there are people writing useful open source software in their spare time. Let's move on, enough talk on the name, let's dig into the actual code.

Thanks

Twitter.com stopped showing the user-agent last week. This project turns that into a positive.

Now I understand what it is, this seems like an interesting project. As a Buffer user, the way it's worded made me think it's an app for Buffer and I couldn't work out what it was adding ;-)

(If anyone does want to build an extension for Buffer, I'd love something that let me schedule certain tweets to post on certain dates way off in the future.. but I don't want to sign up to Hootsuite or anything big like that.)

Calling it an open source Buffer app seemed more elegant than calling it an open source Buffer clone :)

I get your point, but I think the issue is terms like "Facebook app" and "Twitter app" have become popular and mean apps for those platforms.

Not to dilute your efforts at all, but something like "Buffer-like app" or "Buffer-style app" or "Buffer-esque app" would be more precise.

Anyway, congrats for doing this. Back when Buffer's pricing plan was horrible, I was almost tempted to do something similar. Since their reorganization, I've been happy with their pricing plan, but it's always great that open alternatives exist.

We certainly see some confusion from the "app" in our domain. We think of our name as "Buffer" rather than "Buffer app". So I think "an open source Buffer" would make a lot of sense, and might remove this confusion of whether it's something built as an app for Buffer. Love the thinking here, by the way :-)

Got it.

A "Buffer" is pretty generic in software though, so this wording might be confusing also. You could say RabbitMQ is an open source buffer as well :)

I guess we just need to get widespread enough ;) We're working on that.

I think Buffer is a really great brand name by the way

What's interesting here is that you would like as an extension the one feature that I think Buffer chose to exclude from the start to disrupt other pre-existing "Twitter schedulers" by being more easy-to-use :)

But anyways, it would be pretty easy to add this feature to Tampon. I've been thinking about it actually!

To be honest I started using this just because it looked simple and it was open source. I will keep using it.Great work and thank you for this service. Also kudos on the name.

I made a 'buffer' app too: https://github.com/scumola/php-buffer It's not hard to do.

Looks interesting. You can fork it here : https://github.com/julien-c/Tampon/

Tampon ? Is the service also disposable ?

Looks good... But why PHP ?

There are only about 40 or so actual lines of PHP (just a simple REST API handler).

The background daemon is based on PHP-Daemon too, which is actually surprisingly robust and efficient.

40 or so lines? I'm sorry, what? https://github.com/julien-c/Tampon/tree/master/api

Also, I don't think this counts as security:

  if (strlen($id) == 24) {
  // Looks like a valid MongoId

Edit: this looks bad too:

  $post = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);

Wait... why would it be bad?

NoSQL injection ? If such a thing exists ?

There is nothing wrong with either of those two lines of code provided that they are not the only layers of security.

Checking to see if an ID is of the right length is a good way to filter out miss formated ID's early. And the JSON decoding statement is a pretty standard way to get the JSON body out of the request and into an associative array. Of course you will need to validate that it has the right format now, probably using JSON Schema or something similar.

Looks to me like they just insert the JSON body directly into Mongo without any sort of further validation:

  $m->tampon->queue->insert($post);

Ooh yeah that isn't very good. They should really be using a JSON schema validation library to verify that someone isn't storing extra fields in the database, and that all the fields are of the right format and type.

You're right. But the worst thing that can happen is someone POSTs large fake objects and tries to flood my server's hard drive. Which, given the max size of a POST's data will take quite some time :)

The API only allows querying posts on the current user (with now user input) so there's no risk of "NoSQL injection": https://github.com/julien-c/Tampon/blob/master/api/posts.php

I see. I would still recommend JSON schema, though. It is great for debugging and ideal if you plan to open the API up to third party developers, because it makes it easy to ensure that all NoSQL data adheres to a proper schema, and it also provides meaningful error messages if a third party developer accidentally sends badly structured JSON to your service, or even if you accidentally send badly structured JSON to your service due to a front end bug.

I use this JSON Schema validator with great success: http://packagist.org/packages/hasbridge/json-schema-validato...

"Tampon"? Seriously? Trying to be edgy?

Tampon is French for Buffer. I think this is funny.

And "Douche" is French for shower. Both are, as far as humor attempts go, pretty lame.

"The Aristocrats" is a very funny joke. But that doesn't mean it's appropriate to tell in every circumstance. Tampon may or may not be funny, but being funny is not, in and of itself, the measure of whether a name is appropriate.

"The Aristocrats" is a very funny joke. But that doesn't mean it's appropriate to tell in every circumstance.

Aha! This might explain why I haven't been invited to any family events this year..

Sure, sure. But the logo is of a Tampon, the feminine hygiene product, so the connotation is in English.

I guess Tampon in French also means "look we're gonna make an offensive joke for the English world and then point to the French language when criticized for it". Either that or the French engineers live in an alternate Francophone universe.

I honestly fail to understand why you feel it's an "offensive" name - distasteful perhaps, but offensive? To whom?

This is a "Show HN" post, right? Presumably you came here looking for feedback. So far, essentially all of the discussion is of the name.

You might think it's funny. Your primary school friends might think it's funny, too. But it's not really getting you anything, right?

Perhaps it's a hopelessly misguided attempt to encourage women to get involved with the project, but I think it's just an attempt to grab attention via shock value.

Cringeworthy.

I don't think women get attracted to the name (just because they are women). I think it's more for people with a sense of humor.

I think it's more for people with a sense of humor

More accurately: "for tone-deaf people with a seventh-grade sense of humor"

"seventh-grade sense of humor" Even if this would be the case: is this a bad thing? Why so serious?

A seventh-grade sense of humor is fine, when you're in seventh grade. I'm not ashamed to say I'm more sophisticated than that.

If you want me to make me laugh OR take you at all seriously, you're going to have to step up your game. I love humor and levity. Github and Zappos are both great examples of companies that don't take themselves too seriously without being juvenile.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "Great, another silly project name, but now everyone's going to feel awkward saying it." I'm the first to crack jokes on the team, but I don't need my co-workers giggling my direction every time they need to mention it. Not to mention that some [dev] environments aren't very considerate of women/women's issues, and it has the potential (if referenced in/as a joke) to make some people really uncomfortable. Just not worth it.

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