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Show HN: Discusslr.com

discusslr.com

18 pointsowainlewis49 comments

Well done for making something and having the guts to share it with the world.

A bit of critical feedback:

1) the image of a girl on the beach doesn't seem to have much relevance or am I missing something?

2) how is the data stored and backed up? (Details on encryption, backup regularity etc...)

Hi. Thanks for the feedback. Being honest this is a really early stage idea and basically I just wanted to get some nice photography on the home page.

Data is currently stored in RDS on Amazon. When moving to doing private discussions (the next major feature) then I'll really focus in on security and possibly encryption on the messages. Privacy is an interesting topic actually. Making sure private conversations are "unreadable" is something I'm very interested in.

I was a bit hesitant to release it this early to be honest but thought it was better just to "get it out there" and start getting feedback even if it is rough around the edges.

I added a discussion for product feedback and improvements that should be open without any need to sign up. https://discusslr.com/discussions/8

Your discussion has been hijacked by somebody posting /r/spacedicks type pictures.

Yeah I disabled images for anonymous comments. Should have guessed that would happen.

Good god, why the hell did I open that link.

Should be fixed now.

This is a very basic product, don't get me wrong, basic is a good thing.

Some feedback: Registration is very nice, simple steps. However, log in with Gmail/Facebook/Twitter might be a nice option in the future too.

How do you handle links? I didn't check this since I'm on mobile but nofollow would be a good idea to prevent spammers. Maybe even add Google's recaptcha to prevent spam bots for anonymous users/on registration?

For groups/companies, it might be nice if we can register a sub domain and allow others to post new discussions in there to keep it all grouped. But that would mean there'd have to be a moderation option (?).

Hi. Thanks. I suppose the who idea is to keep it simple but some new features will be added for private conversations, better link handling as you mentioned. Will definitely need to start thinking about handling spammers on anonymous comments. i had to turn off images for that very reason. I'll change it so that only logged in users can post images from now on.

I love the idea of private group/companies. Keeping track of many conversations is another big thing that needs to be tackled. So for instance a dashboard to keep track of discussions you're involved in and any notifications around a discussion.

Links are not actually auto-linked at the moment for that reason. They just show up as plain text.

The site is broken for me. I don't see any text. It's just white and blue boxes with a background image of a girl.

Hey. Which browser are you using out of interest?

I'm having the same issue on Arch Linux, Chromium, Version 42.0.2311.90 (64-bit)

Huh. Works for me with Fedora, Google Chrome, Version 42.0.2311.81 (64-bit) and 43.0.2357.37 (64-bit)

Will have to spin up an Arch box and take a look. Don't have access to one at the moment.

exactly the same for me on Arch Linux Chrome (note chrome rather than chromium), Version 40.0.2214.115 (64-bit).

Chrome, Windows 7.

Thanks I'll take a look into that. Haven't really done a huge amount of cross browser work on this. Appreciate the help.

FYI it works when I untick the font-family here:

media="screen" body { background: #fafafa; /* font-family: 'Fira Sans', Helvetica; */ color: #777777; font-size: 14px; }

My instant reaction to the name was that this had something to do with 'cussing' not 'discussing' because I put the emphasis (in my mind) on cusslr and read it as dis-cusslr. Others might have the same reaction.

That's interesting. I never would have thought of that. I just started with the word "discussion" and tried to find an available .com. It's so difficult to find domains for new products.

A tool I made to quickly start and discuss things online. The idea is to quickly setup a conversation about something, share the link and start talking. Comments can be public or anonymous.

I'm always interested in conversation and in supporting people trying to have good conversation.

Some hopefully constructive thoughts: There's nothing about the landing page that makes me want to sign up. Could you show me an example of how it works, what it looks like?

Ideally I think you'd want to seed it with pre-existing conversations, so that new users don't feel like they're signing up for one more thing that doesn't have any obvious value.

Chicken-egg problem– Quora, Reddit, and I'm sure HN itself all started with a small group of people who were having interesting conversations.

Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it. Perhaps a video demo might be a good idea for the homepage to explain the concept. The basic idea is that you create a conversation about anything (making it open to public discussion or anonymous comments) and then just start talking. Kind of like a low friction way to start talking with other people about something online. I decided to push it out early to get some feedback. There is a lot of work to be done. The next feature will be to add private conversations.

Totally agree.

> There's nothing about the landing page that makes me want to > sign up. Could you show me an example of how it works, what > it looks like?

Stop using Unsplash images. Please, don't do it.

+1 like the idea.

Thanks. Haha I take your point about the images. I'll look into getting some higher quality and more relevant material on the homepage to explain the concept a bit more.

That feels like the hardest problem initially. Like you said it's difficult to really explain the concept until there is more content and discussion happening.

Adding the ability to post "anonymous" comments was partly motivated by people who might not want to sign up. If a conversation is "open" then anyone can start commenting without having to sign up.

This might seem sneaky but some people do this by literally having conversations with themselves, using multiple IDs. Sleazy, but hey, if the conversation is great, I'd be more tempted to join in.

Have a look at adhocracy: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy and http://adhocracy.de

You can drastically reduce the actual adhocracy functionality to a simple pro/con discussion platform.

Interesting thanks. Will take a look.

Submit button below the comment box is an <input type="submit" /> but missing a value so it says "Submit Query" on Firefox. Probably should change that.

Thank you. A few people have raised this. Will roll out a fix now. Stupid mistake. Sorry about that.

How is this any different than https://sublevel.net?

I've never seen sublevel before. Looks interesting though.

I've tried both of this sites.

https://discusslr.com/discussions/29

https://sublevel.net/tux/

Discusslr is more like chat and allows you to register without captcha and to reply you don't need to register. SubLevel you need to enter captcha and be registered to comment, it also looks more like Twitter. But SubLevel provides more features like RSS feed of your recent posts.

Sounds similar to my domain http://discusr.com

Nice. Looks like a neat tool. How did you come up with the name?

I wanted to use medium.com but it was closed invite, so I made my own website and then added readability like viewing options. The name came from a previous website that was for people of different religions to discuss on a facebook like feed system. However I scrapped that idea.

owainlewis, I think you could increase signups if you'd add a few screenshots of the discussions. Or let new visitors read them without registration.

That's a great idea. I think the homepage probably needs some more work around explaining the product and screenshots would be a good move. I'll take a look at improving it today.

How is this in any way different from ... forums?

A big part of a forum is the centralization and interconnection of all the threads, this is explicitly removed in this product, with all the discussions happening in their own and very separate context.

So I guess the use case would be to share a link on social media and then have the discussion in something that is not as awful for real discussions as facebook threads or twitter conversations.

I'm not sure making a forum that simply has only one board and no public index is a useful enough differentiator for this project to survive at all. You could do the same thing with secret github gists, AND at the same time already have a much more fully-featured everything.

I'd see this being more useful to a non technical person who doesn't use Github for example and just wants to start a quick conversation. They can create a discussion and open it up to the world. Given a bit more time there will be more features to keep track of mentions and notifications that lift it up from it's currently very basic state.

That's a good way to look at it. The motivation is basically when you want to have a quick discussion about something but email or twitter aren't suitable. Like you mentioned twitter isn't great for real focussed conversations. It's also far more general than a forum, kind of like a forum to talk about literally anything.

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