

Ask HN: Review my Webapp- HN/Reddit-style news with Real Names - Lonava.com - e1ven

The trend of a community to become popular, and then become overrun with uncaring jerks seems inevitable.<p>There have been floods of people who have migrated from Digg-&#62;Reddit-&#62;HN, and even now find HN a bit more ascerbic than they'd like.<p>Over the last few weeks, I've put together a project to try to address this. My hypothesis is that people are less likely to be asses to one another if everyone uses real names. Using your real name a) reminds you that the person on the other side is flesh and blood, with feelings just like you, and b) makes your comments part of your googlable record.<p>Over the last few weekends I put together a webapp- Lonava.com<p>The site is a Reddit/HN/Digg like social discussion site- People can create channels (SubReddits) and post news stories. It's also importing stories from around the web, and you can paste an RSS feed and have it start pulling stories from any site you want. This gives a "default" place for certain stories, so if you want to see XKCD, you can subscribe to the XKCD chan, and not need to post every one of them manually.<p>It's a little rough, since I'm kinda of a crappy programmer, but I think it could be a fun site.<p>It's normally $5 to verify an account, since it costs me about $2.50 after the Credit Card and ID charges, but I've cut it to $1 for today. 
I wanted to cut it to 5 cents, but when I tried that, banks were denying the charge, thinking it was fraudulent. If the $1 is a problem for anyone, Email support@lonava.com and I'll refund it for you.<p>My hopes that I could convince some HN'ers to sign up, verify, and let me know how to improve the site. I'm OK losing money for verification and CCN processing in exchange for getting some feedback.<p>I hope to advertise on Reddit Self Serve in the next week or two, but I want to find the rough spots first.<p>What should I improve? What should I change?
Am I doing too much with RSS import, and losing the soul of the site in the process?<p>Hacker News, How can I do better?<p>I don't expect to make any money with the site; It's a side project, but I'd like to make something people find useful.
======
dman
You might want to tone down you scraping bot. Since posting
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627619> your bot has hit us 100 times in
the last 4 hours.

~~~
e1ven
Sorry about that! I didn't think it would be a problem, but I can see the
programming error I made which is causing it.

Normally, when we pull pages from RSS, we have a UUID attached to each, to
avoid pulling it again. Since it's scraping HN, it doesn't get those, and
isn't behaving nicely.

The reason it pulls the destination page is to get the final link- Too many
sites are tinyurl/bit.ly/etc, so I load them to see who I'm dealing with at
the end of the day.

I'll generate some sort of Token for those to avoid the problem later tonight.
Thanks, and again, Sorry for the trouble!

~~~
e1ven
I've added a new check to the code- It'll check the base URL against existing
stories, before doing the URL normalization.

This should fix the problem for every URL that isn't a tinyurl.

Thanks for the heads-up. Can you verify if it's nicer for your server now?

------
ScottWhigham
Neat site - I think it's a fun side project. Congrats!

------
e1ven
Clickable version- <http://Lonava.com>

