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Comment by karl_gluck | Hacker News Reader

Great idea!

Unfortunately, it looks like you're already getting spammed. I just reviewed Google.com and what I think would have been nsfw site had I let it load.

Also, it takes too long to generate the screenshot. I waited a few minutes before giving up on my third review. Why not just open the site in an iframe?

Getting to try it out without having to log into anything is fantastic.

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There were some temporary problems. Google.com sites were also eliminated, some 'spam' will leak in but anyway provided the people contribute, they submit google.com or microsoft.com because they're not ready to use their own site yet. An option to just post reviews without submitting site will take care of it. Thanks for the heads up!

many sites would not work in iframe (they are an increasing number, sadly), but I second this, as an option at submission time maybe?

Actually, the 'increasing number' thing killed the deal for me so I decided to go for screenshots instead with all their drawbacks.

Generating the screenshot was slow but didn't take anywhere near a few minutes for me. Maybe ~5 seconds. Site probably getting a lot of traffic, I got some errors at first but it works fine now.

Cool site.

Ah, I checked when it was first posted but it seems to be better now. It was probably the site itself and not the screenshot functionality that was the problem.

As suggested in another reply, linking via iframe would still be a nice option to have when submitting.

Thanks for the follow-up. IFrame had actually been there in version 1 but people use really non-standard stuff to break out of frames and some are not even aware of it because they use third-party frameworks.

Screenshot + link to open in a new window actually started as a sort of a workaround but I think this allows people to focus more on first impressions instead of going into usability testing.

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