

Show HN: HN Notify - Email reply notifications for comments and posts. - rkalla
http://hnnotify.com/

======
rkalla
Really been enjoying the HN community and wanted to contribute this back to
help keep people engaged in the conversations they are involved in even as
those comments and replies are pushed down the page.

For anyone interested, this is written with:

    
    
      - Play! Framework 1.2.3
      - MongoDB 1.8.3
      - jQuery (minor, I am not a UI guy)
    

When you signup, it more or less adds a flag in the DB that you want emails
when someone replies to you (whether it is a story reply or a comment reply)
and when you unsubscribe it removes that flag. No stray account info or
history is kept.

Thanks goes out to the HN community for a hell of a lot of great information
and I hope you guys find this handy.

~~~
jeffehobbs
Neat! Thanks for this!

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pixdamix
Would it be possible to add XMPP support ? Then the service could check my
XMPP status and postpone notifications if i'm away, busy, offline...

I tend to prefer IM for this kind of things as it doesn't clutter my mailbox.

~~~
rkalla
Interesting suggestion, I'll take a look at XMPP and see how that would work.
Thanks for the suggestion.

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ColinWright
It seems that I can pretend to be someone else and get notified every time
they get replied to. You could offer protection against that by asking that a
long, semi-random string be placed in the profile of the person registering.

I've registered, and I'll be watching with interest to see if it changes my
relationship with the site.

~~~
genieyclo
Replies are all public anyways. Besides, hackerstream.com let you do this with
multiple people long before.

~~~
akkartik
There's a distinction between getting notified when multiple people comment,
and when they get responses. Is the latter useful at all?

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joshmanders
Nice Work, I've was working on a service sorta like this for HN but it got put
on the back burner for more important projects. Mine is a little different
than this, but essentially same idea.

~~~
rkalla
Thanks Josh. If you don't mind sharing, how was your approach different? Maybe
there is a hybrid idea in there somewhere that makes better sense that I
haven't thought of.

What I currently have on the books is to allow following of individuals (e.g.
"Every time tbob posts something, let me know!") as well as following New
submissions that meet a certain threshold.

I know I don't spend enough time ranking new stories, if I could set a base
threshold like "New story with at least 5 votes" I would probably participate
more.

So I figured I would add something like that.

~~~
joshmanders
Basically the idea behind what I was gonna do was a user can subscribe to
certain keywords. The system would than keep track of the /new page and when a
new post was made with that keyword, for example: "Apple", it would round it
up, and on the next batch of alerts sent out, it'd put that one in the list
for that user to be notified of. Had a bunch of other ideas for it too, a long
with watching what x user submitted, and even the ability to be notified of
"Show HN" and "Ask HN" posts.

~~~
rkalla
Ahh nice, really good ideas.

I agree the following notifications are all handy, didn't think about
Shown/Ask HN posts, that's a good one. As for keywords, that didn't dawn on me
either, another good one.

With all these notification settings I can see that a "digest" style email
once or twice a day might be the way to go to avoid Google banning me for
outbound mail and annoying subscribers.

~~~
joshmanders
Yep, that's a good idea. I've also thought about even allowing users to
subscribe to domains. Want to keep an eye on new TechCrunch articles posted?
Subscribe to techcrunch.com and that will also be put into your notifications.

Best way to handle all this in my opinion would be user accounts, and I know
you probably had the same thing in mind when I started mine. No accounts, just
put an email in, and a keyword and let them input as many as they wanted.

~~~
rkalla
Yea exactly right, I didn't want to go down that every-notification path
because it would make everything more complicated to use.

Also, another user in this thread made me aware of <http://notifo.com/> which
I think does the every-notify already.

I really just wanted to help out HN users specifically, not really a startup I
had in mind. So I'll keep the features paired down to services you good folks
:)

~~~
joshmanders
If I remember correctly, notifo.com is shutting down.

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ColinWright
I could troll someone by signing them up to follow, well, everyone. That could
be a problem, couldn't it?

~~~
rkalla
Right now, yes it could... please don't do that :)

I'll add an email verification step soon.

~~~
ColinWright
I think just requiring them to put a magic string in their profile would be
fairly robust. Yes, it's another step, but I think everything requires an
extra step. You just need to choose what that step will be.

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Urgo
Cool I just signed up. Thanks for creating this. Someone reply here so I can
test it :)

~~~
rkalla
Very welcome!

~~~
Urgo
Nice, it works :)

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simonbrown
Shouldn't it confirm email addresses before subscribing or unsubscribing
people?

~~~
acangiano
In Canada it's a legal requirement. In the US, it's not, but it's still a very
good idea to do so.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Didn't know about Canada - thanks!

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troels
What does this provide that notifo doesn't?

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mdoerneman
Notifo will be shutting down. See here: <http://blog.notifo.com/notifo>

~~~
troels
Oh .. Didn't realise. That's sad news.

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mattmiller
Very cool. Lets see if it works.

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rkalla
Check 1-2, check 1-2 :)

~~~
mattmiller
It works and it is fast.

