

Show HN: My "weekend" project - mtinkerhess

I've been working on a project in my spare time for a few weeks and would appreciate any feedback HN has about it:<p>http://eduanon.com<p>It's a collection of anonymous message boards -- you register for the site with a .edu email address and then you get sent to the message board that corresponds to your school. The site is inspired by the Oberlin Confessional but I've generalised it so that it will work for any .edu email address. I think it's currently at minimum viable product stage -- I have some ideas about where to go next but I'm curious to hear what HN thinks.<p>This is the first dynamic site I've built on this scale. It's built on Django and hosted on Webfaction. I'm not much of a designer, so I tried to throw together some CSS that at least doesn't get in the way.<p>Thanks!<p>EDIT: Test account for HN users: username "hn@hn.edu", pass "hn"
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bigohms
Its fine that the interface is sparse. The fact that the landing page doesn't
imply "activity" is an issue and doesn't present enough of a benefit for the
cost of a user's effort to sign up. Leave sign up for after someone gossips
about a school (on the homepage). I'd also suggest some kind of "live" feed
similar to digg labs for the homepage.

Check out my friend's site, <http://www.couplespark.com/>. Anonymous posting
of relationship issues (developed through one of the popular startup clubs).
The homepage actively promotes engagement.

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mtinkerhess
Yes, I'm facing the chicken-and-egg users problem here, and a better call to
action could help. It's complicated by the fact that I don't want to show a
user any content until I know which school they're from, because I want users
to know that when they post only people from the same school will see it.

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tommoor
I think its a good idea.. add .ac.uk addresses and you have the whole of the
uk covered too ;-)

You need to look at all of the other anonymous / closed communities out there
and try and find a 'hook' that you can use to pull people in without seeing
the content, make people feel like they are missing out on something cool.

I don't know how you feel about facebook kind of stuff, but if you implemented
facebook connect you could potentially show new visitors their friends which
are already on the site and that would be a good impetus to sign up.

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sgt
Can't test, I don't have an .edu email address. I think most HN'ers are
professionals, they are no longer in school/university - with exceptions of
course!

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nowarninglabel
Fortunately, some of us are professionals who happen to work in universities
:)

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mtinkerhess
I'm trying to set up a test account for HN users, and in the process it looks
like I've messed something up. Thanks for the feedback so far, I'm trying to
fix things...

EDIT: Test account: username: "hn@hn.edu", pass is "hn"

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maukdaddy
Some K12 schools don't have .edu address. For example, *.k12.il.us for schools
in IL.

Furthermore, I'm not sure if your target is higher ed or secondary ed, but a
lot of k12 schools will block anonymous boards.

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mtinkerhess
I'm expecting the target will be college campuses.

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invisible
I'd like to see other schools - e.g. what ABC school's students REALLY think
of their school. I feel like there is a very small set of use cases for a
thing like this, and it's missing some of the bigger ones.

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unohoo
While I cant test the app since i dont have a valid .edu address, one thing
you might wanna take care of is some sort of moderation. Anonymous boards can
lead to the same set of issues that plagued juicycampus.

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mtinkerhess
I Googled juicycampus, which lead me to collegeacb.com, which looks just like
what I'm trying to do. Oh well, I guess if other people are doing it that
means it's not a stupid idea?

Yeah, moderation will be an issue -- I'm thinking some kind of voting and / or
flagging system could help with that.

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dinedal
Any way us non-.edu address people can get a read only account?

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jaxn
I guess I can't try it out without an email from a .edu :-/

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mtinkerhess
Clicky: <http://eduanon.com>

