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New create your own subreddit site -- seeking feedback

19 points by bdr ↗ HN
We've been working on a site to let you create your own subreddit: http://www.linkherd.com/

There are quite a number of rough edges, but since reddit's announcement yesterday, we want to get feedback as soon as possible.

Here are some features:

* customize your network's appearance by uploading a stylesheet

* subscribe your network to an RSS feed -- all links from the feed will automatically get submitted

* subscribe your subreddit to another subreddit -- for example, 'python' could subscribe to 'django'

* restrict commenting/voting/submitting to approved users

Any critiques will be appreciated.

32 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] thread
kyro
Not sure if you were aware, but reddit has recently unveiled their new sub-reddit feature, and it's in private testing.

Good effort, though. Might want to have a live feed of all the new stories coming in on the front page, so I'm enticed to join some communities and contribute by finding interesting stories on the front page.

Congrats.

bdr
Thank you! We heard about reddit's plans, that's why we launched today. Great idea for the front page.
dfens
Are you going to submit this to Reddit?
simonw
Looks nice. Dumb feature request: how about custom subdomains? http://subject.linkherd.com/ suggests more of a standalone community than linkherd.com/subject . I've used wildcard DNS for this kind of thing in the past (e.g. simon.idproxy.net )
thorax
That's not dumb, that's a great request.
viergroupie
Yeah, not dumb at all. It's on the to-do list, thanks.
simonw
OpenID support would be nice too ;)
bdr
Will look into it -- saw the link you posted on linkherd.com/django
simonw
Having links like /django/78/up/ is a CSRF attack just waiting to happen - you should turn them in to POST forms (preferably with some unobtrusive Ajax) and add a form key to prevent people from tricking other logged in users in to up-voting stories.
bdr
We check the HTTP_REFERER to make sure it's coming from linkherd.com.
martin
That can be easily fudged, can it not?
bdr
Yes, but not to do the kind of attack simonw is thinking about. You can't set the header from Javascript or HTML. You can forge it from older versions of Flash, but Flash 9 has enough penetration now that it's safe.
rms
So what's to stop an attacker from downloading an old version of flash?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
bdr
Only browsers with an old version of Flash installed can be tricked into executing a forged cross-site request. The attacker wouldn't gain anything by installing it on their own machine.
there
i have my browser configured not to send referrers.
simonw
Form tokens are more robust - some people strip referrers (sometimes even at the firewall level) to prevent information leakage from their corporate intranets.
bdr
Weird. Anyways, we changed to form tokens.
utnick
can you allow users to create subreddits with their own adsense or other ads shown?

that could be a killer feature over reddit

bdr
Yes, the idea to have some kind of revenue-sharing model with networks that want to show ads. Wasn't sure if this plan was worth mentioning at this early stage, but since you asked.

Of course, no one will be forced to show ads -- we can't, since network owners control their own stylesheet.

thorax
I'll give you a dollar if you please change the site to use Verdana or some other font than the default you use now. (Please, please!)
ekanes
Me too. holds out dollar
bdr
Great, I've PMed both of you with our paypal info. Could this be a new business model?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cdr
Imagine 2+ users, each wanting say, Verdana or not-Verdana, and each giving you a dollar each time you change it.
thorax
Please make the + - buttons larger, I found them hard to click on directly.
jamesbritt
I created a site for Refactor Phoenix. Once created, I saw that the URL kept the space in the words, but it's encoded as %20.

In retrospect I wish I had entered the name differently so that I could have avoid that space.

Really, I want to have it both ways: a title of Refactor Phoenix, but a url with no gaps (/refactorphoenix).

I saw no way to edit this, or to delete the network.

bdr
Soon we're going to make it so that /refactorphoenix works, along with /refF%20ac._torphE.ON_Ix , and /refactorphoenix will be the default URL
viergroupie
I just updated linkherd.com and urls are now stripped of spaces and underlines. Please let us know if you spot any problems.