Heh, I've been working on something similar too, but sending notifications to slack - https://littlebirdie.io/ it's sort of in beta phase at the moment, but you're free to check it out.
The difference between F5Bot and trackreddit, is that F5Bot is free and it covers HN + Lobsters too. I have plans to add a couple other sites soon as well. I also like to think that F5Bot has an easier interface. Trackreddit does have a few additional features.
The verification email doesn't use HTML. Does it not show up as clickable in your email client?
I've tried to write something similar, but I found that I was hitting the upper comment limitation of reddits API (ie. If there are more than 10k comments on a subreddit within an hour). How did you get around this problem?
I'm not monitoring the really popular subreddits. Let's face it, no one is going to mention me in /r/Pics, so I don't bother monitoring it.
You can see exactly what is monitored here: https://f5bot.com/what I'm focusing on mostly programmer related subreddits for now, but I'll add subreddits as people ask. I had a couple people ask yesterday for me to add specific subreddits, and I did.
I made this as a tool that I found useful, and I decided that it wouldn't be much more work to turn it into a free service and share. I'll probably open-source it if there's any interest.
i think you should consider making a profitable product out of it instead of open sourcing it(i know we are good samritans :) ). It can be used as marketing tool. Brands will subscribe to your service and will be informed when their brand name appears on site. This can than be used for damage control if it involves bad press or marketing for e.g answering questions giving discount etc. if someone shows interest.
I saw this before I built F5Bot. They want $29/mo for 2 alerts. I thought that was crazy, so I wrote F5Bot.
The F5Bot prototype only took me about 2 hours to write, and I tested it personally for a month with good success. Then I realized I could pretty easily add user accounts and share it, so I did.
This is a free service that I built in a couple hours, so I put in some limits for now. I didn't want someone to put in a word like 'react' and then get flooded with unwanted emails ('react' is a common English word, most of the results wouldn't even be relevant). I think I'll raise the limits eventually, but I want to add a few more features first, such as one-click-unsubscribe, before I start allowing people to get 1000 alerts a day.
In the meantime, feel free to add more specific phrases. For example, you could add 'react js' or 'with react' or 'in react' to get some relevant results.
It sends an email for each mention. It usually happens within a couple minutes after the post. The idea is that you could actually head over and join the conversation, if needed.
