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Comment by mcantor | Hacker News Reader

This is adorable, and I hope things work out for you. I showed my girlfriend (who is a geek, but not a programmer or engineer or anything of the sort) and she commented: "Okay, that's the cutest f*ing thing EVER."

Some suggestions--What about alternate spellings? It would be unfortunate if someone typed in "Kat Smith" and came up as incorrect because the original poster typed "Kathryn Smith". Also, it would be nice if there were some kind of personalization that you could apply to the public page; you know, like "Guess John Smith's crush" instead of "Guess My Crush".

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Thanks so much, especially for your ideas. I wanted to avoid any sort of sign up, so I don't actually collect the "crusher"'s name (just the "crushee"). The system will tolerate names within an edit-distance of 2, so many common spelling errors will be ignored (not to mention the added layer of plausible deniability). I also recently added a "really close"/"close"/"sorta close"/"way off" hinting system -- so when you guess, you'll see that the prompt reflects how similar your guess is to the actual crushee.

One thing I'm going to add is a little cookie-based cache of your recent cupidco.de tracking pages, as they start to get difficult to juggle after some time.

Hmmm. But, there is still a secret tracking page connected to the public page, right? Shouldn't it be possible to use the secret tracking page to enter your name, and have the changes be reflected on the public page?

Kudos for completely avoiding sign up, btw. If there's no way to do what I described above without adding sign up, then for God's sake, don't do it. You're a champ for breaking the sign up trend already.

The hinting system is such an awesome idea. I'll have to spread this around to a couple of my buddies so I can try it out!

Thanks! I wanted to keep the site as simple as possible; sign up is a pain in the butt and typically totally unnecessary.

It should be possible to let you recycle your cupidco.de (so as to switch out the crush name, etc). Is that what you mean? I'll look into that tonight.

Alternate spellings would be great, and guessing the first name would also be good. Maybe you could facilitate this:

1. What's your crush's full name?

2. What's your crush's first name?

3. What's your crush's screen name?

I got 3 guesses for her twitter handle, and 1 for her first name, and 2 for first and last name. I happen to know her middle name, and entered that, so it registered all of these as incorrect.

I agree, I entered the full name and people I sent it to are guessing mostly first names and getting it wrong even if they guess the right first name.

Definitely a great idea... I'll try to throw this in ASAP. Perhaps I'll have it update the prompt as you've described instead of increasing the flexibility of the comparison.

Added a number of words in name hint on the guessing page! Hope this works!

Thanks for your excellent idea. I added a number of words hint to the guess page -- let me know if you think this'll do it :D

Nope, not doing it.

The font is way too small. Is there any way to make it case-insensitive? Or perhaps tell someone how close they were, or if they matched any of hte parts of the name?

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