Ask HN: What do you think of my new site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think of my new site?

foosurvey.com

23 pointsngs24 comments

It required me to enter a name and email so I didn't bother voting.

Yes, an email address to answer a frivolous online poll is pretty extreme.

I can understand why you might want people to enter an email address (for validation/more authentic results etc...) and if you're going to take that approach you sell it to your audience - tell them what the benefits are.

Also say that the email address requires validation. I put in a fake address and of-course my vote didn't get counted. If I knew up-front it was to be validated I probably would have entered a correct one.

Having said all that I don't agree with email validation. It doesn't ensure unique votes. Can you explain why you choose it?

Also some of your buttons perform JavaScript operations, some load new pages - with the same design and sitting next to each other. It's always best to be consistent and have some sort of icon or UI element to define which actions keep you on the same page.

I agree that email validation is flawed in terms of ensuring uniqueness, so this is something I may drop and insist users create an account. One thing I have considered in the mean time is allowing registered users to hide non-signed in participants.

That'd be better. Make the default action when voting "vote as anonymous, unless logged in", and upgrade that anonymous vote to a registered one if the user decides to register after voting.

Also, having an account is not ensuring uniqueness either.

Interestingly, one of the main criticisms I originally received was that you could vote without providing an email address!

same..

I don't consider myself experienced enough to give anybody advice on startups, but it seems to me that programmers should pick up non-CS skill-sets. That way, two things may happen. - Your startup won't be a clone of about 500 other startups. - You will be solving real-world problems for sectors who don't receive the attention of most programmers.

In other words, follow Octopart's lead.

I know this wasn't a review of your startup, I just don't think this survey idea has any viability anymore.

I generally agree with you, however, from memory, I recall pg saying that entering a crowded market isn't necessarily a move that should be avoided. I think there's plenty of opportunities to beat established web sites by providing better solutions.

Cant help feel the name was created by a programmer. Outside of the computer world. Are there examples using "foo"?

The UI looks a little bit copied from elsewhere on the net.

I like the idea of being able to create a quick poll and let it loose. Not sure if there is away to let it loose on the twitterspehre.

Am I correct in thinking you mine ( to a degree ) the realtime statements on twitter to help populate your thoughts or to just sound cool.

A major positive, I like you are trying to make money from the get go. ( Even if it is a little hidden = faq )

As always and most unlikely, would be curious to know if anyone has bitten and has paid to use it. You could benefit from a demo, or a reasons why paying $1 is worth it for a poll. That kinda stuff.

foobar / fubar is military slang

What does the world think? Survey your friends, colleagues, customers and millions of Twitter users!

Sounds like a sales pitch, not a slogan. It's also too long. Just a thought.

Simply 'What does the world think?' might be better.

Good point. The business model for this site is to help small businesses survey their customers and employees which needs to be the focus for promo material like tag lines, FAQ etc. The objective is to grow a paying user base who survey people with little insentive to spoof their responses (like voting multiple times), which negates some criticism like 'why would anyone provide an email for a frivolous poll'.

It's a survey site... it seems to imply that I have to pay people to take my surveys/will get paid to take surveys... but the site gives absolutely no details on how this is supposed to work, or why I might want to do it (the FAQ answers what, not how or why).

The word Twitter also appears a lot, and I can't tell what connection this has to it. Do you have permission to use Twitterific's logo like that? Or even Apple's Mail logo?

I don't think we're using Twitterifics logo, but I'll check as that wouldn't be right. Thanks for mentioning that.

It looked pretty terrible to me. Um, congratulations on making a polling web site I guess??

We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

Looking at the exception log, this appears to have happened was when you tried to vote without providing an email address? I can't reproduce the error but will investigate further.

I filled in 'test' for name and got the message: "Name already used with a different email address!" and the results were shown.

Did I vote, or do I have to change the name and try again? What if it was my real name that is already used?

Does anyone else remember a company called PollGround from one of the first YC rounds?

I selected the option "boring" yet the results still show 0 votes.

Joe Average might not be able to appreciate the "foo".

Love your banner/logo

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