

Ask HN: Review our app ReSubj.com - snitko

http://resubj.com
======
jm4
1) The name is awful. I don't have a nice way to say it. I'm sorry. Assuming
people like the app how are they going to spread the word? The name can't be
pronounced without sounding like a person who is possessed.

2) Why would someone use this? Right off the bat I don't get why I should use
this instead of email. In order to start a discussion I need to know the email
addresses of the initial participants whereas newsgroup or mailing list posts
go out to hundreds or thousands of people I may or may not know ahead of time.
If I need to know exactly who's going to be involved from the start it's
easier to use my mail client.

I understand that the discussion can be made public on here, but what's the
point? Sure, you don't need a newsgroup already set up, but a newsgroup is
also a good starting point for someone looking for discussions about a
particular topic. I just don't understand what need this is fulfilling. This
needs to be made clear on the front page so potential users don't navigate
away 15 seconds after landing on it with the impression that this is a
reinvention of the wheel.

[edit] There's a small grammatical error on the About page. "Discuss any topic
with _lot's_ of people right now and waste no time for registration." should
be "Discuss any topic with _lots_ of people right now and waste no time for
registration." "Lots" is plural; "lot's" is possessive.

~~~
Adlai
I think the idea is to track discussions through email as threads, rather than
just a long list of messages.

That said, you bring up a valid point about reinventing the wheel -- GMail
does this already with conversations. So this app would need something more.

One idea off the top of my head is to enable people to participate in a
discussion using an account on the site, rather than through email. Maybe also
allowing people to comment on public discussions, but giving their comments a
lower priority (along the lines of HN's prioritizing of comments).

------
Adlai
I like the idea. I just made a quick test (visible here:
<http://www.resubj.com/inboxes/1152>) to look at the code formatting. The
formatting looks great for Ruby, but not-so-much for Lisp. Not a huge issue,
but maybe when somebody clicks the _programmer?_ link, it'll show a list of
supported languages.

The email that I got was in plain text. Maybe there could be an option when
creating the message to send the emails with formatting? That way, if you know
that your friends can see formatted emails, you can send properly colored
code.

Comment posting is very quick. When I sent in a comment through email, it took
about half a minute for the comment to show up -- but I guess that's to be
expected.

So, my general verdict:

I like the idea.

However, I think that for it to appeal to non-hackers, it should support
formatting. It could even be something simple, like the _italics_ supported by
HN.

~~~
snitko
Thank you for your reply. Emailing comments is probably that slow because we
haven't optimized the emails queue (that's coming).

Sending emails in HTML is a big question to me. I believe that people who
would prefer HTML emails to plaintext ones would also prefer web-interface to
email-client when posting new comments. What do you think?

~~~
Adlai
I'm not sure about that question.

Another improvement you could make to the code display is to display the
language in which the code is written.

~~~
snitko
Good idea, thanks.

------
erikwiffin
I think you're on to something here.

At work, a short comment in an email can very quickly build up into a large
and complicated discussion. Lots of branching, occasionally hitting reply
instead of reply-all, really a nasty mess. Part of the problem could be that
I'm used to gmail and at work I have to use outlook, but I digress.

I think it would be really cool if once an email conversation kicks off, if I
could send the entire thing to a resubj email address, and have it
automatically build up the conversation up to that point. Then, the
conversation could continue in resubj. If you implement this, or it is already
in place and I missed it, let me know and I will start using your service
_immediately_.

edit: also, if you set up some kind of api so that I could embed conversations
on other websites, that would be kinda cool.

~~~
snitko
I'n not sure about building up a conversation up to the point. Could you be
more specific? API is a good idea and it is in TODO list, but not a number one
priority.

~~~
Adlai
I think he means reconstructing a conversation by looking at quoted text (all
the "On XYZ day, Joe Shmoe said:" stuff). If one person had been getting all
the reply-alls of a conversation, he could create a discussion on your site,
and forward a few of the emails. Your site would then reconstruct the quoted
conversations.

It's quite a fuzzily-defined feature, because people don't always quote entire
messages, they can change messages, and the characters used to mark off quoted
text vary between email clients. However, it would be a cool feature to
implement, maybe as an optional thing.

