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Show HN: My "weekend" project

10 points by mtinkerhess ↗ HN
I've been working on a project in my spare time for a few weeks and would appreciate any feedback HN has about it:

http://eduanon.com

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.

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.

Thanks!

EDIT: Test account for HN users: username "hn@hn.edu", pass "hn"

14 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] thread
dinedal
Any way us non-.edu address people can get a read only account?
jaxn
I guess I can't try it out without an email from a .edu :-/
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!
nowarninglabel
Fortunately, some of us are professionals who happen to work in universities :)
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.

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

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.
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.
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.

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"

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.
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.