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Comment by drusenko | Hacker News Reader

hey everyone, happy to answer any questions you have! worth pointing out that we've also launched a new home page (check out the video, pretty fun), we have a pretty kick-ass new eCommerce platform we launched last Nov, and we're also launching some pretty awesome new themes this week -- you can see two previews here:

http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/ http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/

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Are you guys pursuing Real Estate and Restaurant Industries[1] ? Both industries continue to produce some of the worst websites.

[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/08/...

We are focused on real estate. Check out http://www.Everdwell.com

Here are a few example sites:

http://2200pacific.everdwell.com http://465diamond.com/

Why is there a limit on password length for a Weebly account? How are you storing passwords?

Pretty sure this is a vestige of times past. We should definitely allow longer passwords.

We salt and hash all passwords using a variable-cost bcrypt implementation.

With bcrypt you should set a limit of 72 bytes to avoid fooling users into thinking the stuff beyond the 72nd byte matters (bcrypt truncates it.)

Why should I have to choose a different, shorter password because of your implementation details? Seems like an unnecessary annoyance.

It is annoying, but it is necessary to avoid users choosing longer passwords where the necessary randomness is beyond the 72nd byte. Allowing a password of unlimited length when you support only e.g. 20 or 50 bytes is just as bad as putting in a maximum length restriction when you don't have one. Ideally, just use scrypt or PBKDF2, which don't have length restrictions.

I wouldn't want to limit the password a user supplies. Any password should work, including 1 byte or 1 gb passwords. Restrictions of any form have always just caused more problems than they've solved.

But the solution I've favored is hashing the user's password on the client with a hash that provides enough significant bits that your key derivation on the server is not weakened. This way you get the benefit of not needing to deal with differences in transmission size and the user's plaintext password is never exposed to any listener (regardless of whether the connection is secure, or believed to be secure).

Your passwords are routinely longer than 72 bytes, and this is an inconvenience?

Or hash it first using SHA3. Then you get the slowness of bcrypt (which is what you're using it for) and the variable length input of SHA3. You're only risk is a SHA3 collision, which is not something that is realistically going to happen.

Yep. Absolutely.

We fixed the password limit. Thanks for the great feedback.

Now that, folks, is how you take care of your users. Other startups (Coinbase I'm looking at you...) would do well to take note.

Here's a small list of problems found from a quick test.

1. It's monolingual.

2. It's mono-currency.

3. It has a hidden schedule of fees like ripoff domain name registration with unwanted extra features, support for requisite features like SSL support (duh!) and shipping calculations.

4. It's not clear for which jurisdictions/product types you support tax calculations, or whether multi-party split revenue models are supported (eg. for dropship scenarios, digital product retailing eg. online content). Dynamic pricing also looks like it's not supported .. common digital retailing operations might use this, eg. for Hollywood content.

5. It's unclear to me based in China whether or not I can receive payments through your system.

6. It has no support for communities (eg. hosted forums) which despite not being Web2.0 are actually pretty cool for building customers for ecommerce operations.

7. The actual build bit seems almost completely disconnected from the plan bit, which mostly talks in gross generalities about the build bit without making you do it. The link between the two could be improved.

8. Dogecoin support?

Congrats on getting rich.

How do I get in touch for feature requests or to report bugs I've been using Weebly for a couple weeks to sell my new product and there are two things with it that I think might be easy to fix that are kind of really annoying for me in what would otherwise be a perfect experience.

I tried your feature request voting website but it didn't seem like my suggestions showed up at all after submitting them.

feel free to email me directly at david@weebly.com, i always love hearing about the things that aren't working perfectly.

What % of resources does Weebly devote to personal websites (www.myname.com) versus business websites (www.mycompany.com)?

60% of people starting something on Weebly consider themself an entrepreneur. The majority of people are doing things like http://thewhiskeyball.com or http://unfoldyogaoc.com or http://ourtable.us. That's what we focus on.

There are plenty of people using Weebly for personal projects or educational purposes (teachers, professors, students), but our core focus is entrepreneurs.

I'm one of those people using it for personal projects. I'm a member of a local air cadet unit and i use weebly to run a webste for the unit that is used primarily to communicate info with the other members of the program and the unit. Weebly is a fantastic tool and I enjoy all of the improvements tha you guys have been making!

Do you have any API or importer? I'm involved with an vertical which sometimes don't even have a website set up.

I don't want to be in the web site or CMS business. I've sufficient metadata from my application to export enough information to generate a single page website for these clients. How can I send them your way?

The video is really nice but the site is really hard to navigate. The scrolling on the front page is really wonky (I use a regular mouse on PC and I have to scroll the wheel about a dozen times before the page goes down), browser back navigation is totally broken when you have the menu open, the menu is really hidden it almost feels like you're not supposed to use it. I was trying to find the list of features and it took me a while to even see the menu with the features page. Maybe add a "see more features" on the front page where you list the most important ones to take you to the more detailed view.

The app itself is very nice.

Hm. I probably shouldn't say this, since I am hoping to take advantage of it, but I am curious how you would stay relevant if a completely open source platform build around drag-and-drop Polymer/web components managed to become popular? Or even any kind of open source composable widget-based platform.

Or maybe that just isn't a concern because so far nothing like that exists?

I like the idea of Weebly, I think building web software should be based on components for the programmers and usability for users. But I don't see how a closed platform stays relevant.

I think its just that most web developers still don't understand widgets.

David, great work on the new landing page!

I'd love to know what's your take on third party integrations with Weebly - are you guys working on an App Store or this is only doable through partnerships? If only partnerships, what's the best way reach out?

We're a platform offering customisable widgets, currently rebranding as Widgetic. I played with some widgets here: http://vuzum.weebly.com. Oana Calugar (at Weebly) has reached out to us a while ago and I agree with her, we do fit as a glove. :-)

UPDATE: Should point out that these same widgets work on any other platform too: http://blogvio.yolasite.com.

I remember having a look at a friends Weebly sites and couldn't help but notice you insert your own Google Analytics tracking code on every website without any option to remove it. Is this still the standard for Weebly sites? If so is this a part of the business model? Do you plan on allowing people to opt out?

Honestly, it's just for our own reporting purposes so we can understand the traffic on the network a bit more. We don't use it in any nefarious way or to monetize, it's just informational to help us scale.

Congrats David. The new homepage looks super clean. Excited to see what the future has to offer for Weebly.

Hey, just a small point: the link to your "Plans & Pricing" page from Google (search for Weebly) just goes to your homepage. I'm interested in that information before I sign up.

In new theme pricing and options seems to be hidden for non-registered users... To bad.

We're fixing that!

I agree. Was interested in signing up or at least seeing how much it cost but there is no link from menu for plans and pricing... Pretty big deal breaker for me.

Went to sign up but sign up page was on a non SSL page. I don't like sending passwords in the clear.

It's free to sign up for an account and start making sites with it, and you can easily transition to a paid plan after trying it out or even remian on a free one.

Would love to get know (knoxpayments.com) as a payment option on the weebly ecommerce platform. Anyway we can do that, do we need to build a plugin?

Any chance of getting custom template editing for the mobile sites?

Would love to add some buttons to page and what not.

I would like only answer for one question. Are your paid members above 1% of all accounts, or below?

Are you doing a Denton/Kinja thing with the "editmysite.com" dependency?

How big is your team now?

120

Can we take pre-orders with your e-commerce platform?

Purple Haze isn't purple at all!

"happy to answer any questions you have" - well for now it looks like you are rather selective with answering them...

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