MaximilianKohlr

For SEO, you should pur this in the title: "Waitlists with built-in referrals"

I mostly use gmail since I think it's quite a bit better than most other options, so I'm the most familiar with gmail. And I know that when you click "spam" in gmail it will ask you if you actually mean to unsubscribe.

For my business, I've never received any complaints that someone unsubscribed and still received another email. But most people probably wouldn't bother emailing me to complain if it did happen.

I also mark "legitimate" senders who don't have a functional unsubscribe as spam.

I saw another HN user saying Outlook will happily whitelist you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331455), but I contacted them and they did not give me such an option.

Feel free to give suggestions for other ways I should/could be doing it.

>developers and product owners like you are continuing to drive the problem by insisting that "No, it's the users who are wrong!".

This makes no sense. I'm the problem for responding to people who signed up for something?

>I am telling you that users hitting report spam on emails (yours, or others) that they don't want to see are not abusing the button. They are sending a signal that they don't want to see (or receive) those emails anymore. They are using the user interface of their client to control their user experience because they have decided that your workflow (or others workflows) to stop receiving the messages is more annoying than hitting that button. It's not a user problem, it's an ecosystem problem

The email providers need to account for that and not send emails to spam because less than half of 1% of users mark them as spam. Email providers are already taking steps (unsubscribe header) to make things easier. And as I saId, I've done everything in my power to do so as well.

>you are still attacking or insulting not only your users, but also all of the people who may have or will receive unsolicited email address from a service adjacent (in a shared cloud service sense) to yours.

I don't see how.

This doesn't appear to be useful to continue if you're insisting there are no differences between types of emails.

>Conversely, think of it from the perspective that those 1% of users are fed up with receiving marketing emails

You may have missed the part where I described how I open emails with "You're receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don't want any more". The link to unsubscribe/blocklist is at the top of the email. They are simply abusing the "report spam" button. They applied for something, or someone used their email to apply. Getting a response to that application is not spam.

>If you are attacking the intelligence of your users

I'm listing supporting facts for why it's insane to let less than 1% of the population to dictate something for everyone else.

> You want to send marketing email

Email. Not marketing email.

>you opted to use a cheaper service that has documented considerations for reputation impact. You know the correct solution, you just think you are entitled to a lower cost service

This is incorrect. I addressed it in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41708652

I have not found a way to do that with Google Forms, so the first email I send them is telling them whether or not they passed. That email has an unsubscribe link.

That seems off-topic. I'm not cold-emailing people. They applied on our website.

For $25/mo, which is a 50% increase in my monthly SES cost. And based on my experience with contacting Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., there is no way to get my dedicated IP whitelisted or removed from a blacklist once it's on one.

And given that the normal SES complaint rate is 0.3-0.5%, and 0-2% for google postmaster when simply responding to people who applied with a "you did/didn't qualify", my dedicated IP is very likely to get blacklisted.

Also, the whole point of using SES is for them to handle the blacklist stuff. It's much cheaper to set up your own SMTP server, but deliverability is supposed to be better and easier with Amazon SES.

Interesting! $30 and free forms https://bootstrapstudio.io/forms.

It looks similar to TeleportHQ.

It doesn't look like something you can design a site with. It looks like something that allows you to do minor edits to an existing site.

I appreciate your insight. Using MKDocs Material with Netlify has been very smooth and easy though. I wouldn't even recommend one of the other WYSIWYG builder sites to a novice if they wanted a documentation site. There's got to be something similar for personal & business sites.

I'm also hosting my own forum now, and while that was more complicated to get set up, I find it completely doable.

It would be appropriate for someone with a tech blog. I'm not a "techie", nor do I have a tech blog. I'm seeking advice from knowledgeable people. See my other recent comment.

When asking for help/advice it's useful to start off by doing some research and covering everything you've tried thus far, instead of expecting others to do everything for you.

I've searched everywhere and posted to various forums and included all the info I've found thus far.

SSGs have been discussed on HN but not in-depth like this and not targeted towards noobies. But I've seen that many people on HN are very knowledgeable about SSGs and even created ones themselves. So this seems to be a good place to post about this.

# Email contact forms:

One feature SSGs are missing is email contact forms. Some of them use Netlify forms https://www.netlify.com/platform/core/forms/ - 100 submissions per site /month ($19+ when exceeded). https://docs.netlify.com/accounts-and-billing/billing-faq/

Hugo's Piko theme uses FormSubmit.io (free) or Fabform.io ($5/mo). But I haven't tested that to understand how well it works and why/how it's free.

Hugo's Tella theme uses getform.io -- https://github.com/opera7133/tella/issues/63 (50/mo).

250/mo for free and $8/mo for unlimited with https://web3forms.com/ is the best I've seen so far _(besides the completely free one which I'm not sure about)_.

I haven't seen any of them mention using an SMTP.

I saw these *HTML templates* https://html5up.net/ recommended on another forum, but I would think they’d require more technical knowledge to use/customize than an SSG. They’re all pretty elaborate too. None are basic business or personal type websites.

# Wordpress:

I created a basic, free WordPress site some years ago when I was trying to set up a blog and I found it difficult to use and opted instead for Blogspot. However, I have more experience & knowledge now, so self-hosted Wordpress might be an option.

When I looked into Wordpress I was comparing the ".com" options (wordpress.com/pricing) with Squarespace, and they were more expensive. Now that I'm more familiar with hosting my own linux web server, I could probably use the ".org" and host on a $5-10/mo server but *I get a lot of traffic on my business site (_can reach 1m+ views in a month_) and I'm not sure how good/costly a server I'd need to keep it running*.

I saw *Oxygen Builder* recommended as a "Squarespace-type UI" for Wordpress, and I watched some of the tutorials (oxygenbuilder.com/tutorials) and it seems like a decent option for a one-time $130 fee. But still not static.

I saw someone using the https://generatepress.com/ WordPress theme for their website https://servermanager.guide/about. It looks like the premium $44/yr option may be similar enough to Squarespace.

It looks like you can also install wordpress on your PC and use plugins to output static sites. A limiting factor may be finding free/cheap plugins that make it as easy to edit as Squarespace. And I don't see a way to get contact/email forms working.

# Flat CMS options:

I found this [10 Best Flat CMS for Lightweight Websites - https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/flat-cms/] which lists *Grav* at #1. I checked out Grav and it's purely markdown and has nice templates (_Open Publishing Space, Agency, Deliver Site_) https://getgrav.org/downloads/skeletons. So that might be the best option. The Agency template has a *contact form*, but [looking at the code](https://github.com/getgrav/grav-skeleton-agency-site/blob/de...) I don't see how it's being submitted/sent/emailed.

I found this page - https://learn.getgrav.org/17/forms/forms/example-form - which looks like it can utilize any SMTP - https://github.com/getgrav/grav-plugin-email/blob/develop/RE.... But that, the installation instructions, and [the webhosting section](https://learn.getgrav.org/16/webservers-hosting) all indicate that it's not a static site that you can upload to Netlify. But it still seems like a cheap and user-friendly alternative to Squarespace.

It looks like Grav has a [static generator plugin](https://getgrav.org/downloads/plugins) (and another one called [blackhole](https://github.com/barryanders/grav-plugin-blackhole)). If you can install php on your PC you can probably use Grav locally to output a static site. I'm guessing that would disable the email/contact function (and other dynamic features) though.

I saw [*Decap CMS*](https://decapcms.org/) mentioned as another possibility but the editor seems too limited.

It looks like the other "Best Flat CMS" options are also not static sites.

When I searched for this I had a very hard time finding a right answer because all the results were SEO blogs advertising their newsletter services (Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc.), which is not the same thing.

So I wrote this overview covering all the options I found. Additional input is welcome.

Even though Listmonk seems like the best free & open source option, there aren't many guides for it and the documentation is quite limited. So [I've been having trouble getting it running on a CentOS server](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/issues/1004#issuecomment-1...).

It's a shame that it seems to be used by thousands of people but almost no one bothers to create guides or improve the docs.

>Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has.

Saidit is a publicly funded, opensource alternative to Reddit, that uses the same old.reddit code. For anyone who doesn't like the Fediverse, Saidit seems like the best option.

As mentioned in the blog though, the UK has a law (Consumer Rights Act) covering this. California (where I am) seems to generally have strong laws as well.

Also, I can't believe it would be legal for a Facebook employee, for example, to use their position to harm a public figure, journalist, critic, politician, etc.. That seems very illegal.

Lists the problems & benefits of reddit, and argues for the need for viable alternatives.

It covers reddit retaliating against me (seemingly illegally) for being a long-time public critic of theirs. They did something similar to the /r/WatchRedditDie founder.

Is anyone familiar with US laws related to Reddit admins using their position to try to harm me in an act of revenge? Surely there are some limits on what they're legally allowed to do. I imagine it would vary from state to state. My state (CA) bar referral services haven't been very helpful in finding someone familiar with this situation. Recommendations for how to find a lawyer specialized in this would be appreciated.

I'm not a fan of this list. Other than climate change, I do not see it addressing the biggest issues of our time.

Not a single mention of the exponential increase in chronic disease which is leading us down the path of Idiocracy. Having the main focus on infant/child mortality seems misguided.

Perhaps in your bubble you're surrounded by intelligent and competent people. Out here in the real world the vast majority of people are extremely unintelligent, incompetent, and sickly. And it pervades all professions. There is nearly no such thing as a "professional" anymore; just a bunch of bumbling fools trying to make it through their day and get back home.

Replacing all professions with AI should be a primary goal, so that we no longer have our lives in the hands of incompetent, sickly, poorly functioning people.

Overwhelmingly I see the most intelligent & healthy people not having kids, and the most unintelligent, sickly people making more copies of themselves.

I read this article https://www.followchain.org/account-disabled-violating-terms... saying you may need to do it multiple times. I finally relinquished and did it 3 times. No response at all. This is such BS.