HN Explorer

Ask PG: why am I dead?

97 points by trumbitta2 ↗ HN
I dont' get it. I lurk a lot, try to comment only when I have something to say.

After months of this, today I tried to "Show HN" the new release of the software I'm working on since 2004 with an amazing team... only to find that I am "dead" and that my post is spam ("Stop spamming us, you are wasting your time").

[Edit to better clarify]: I'd sincerely like to know what I did wrong, to make sure I'm not going to do it again. Ever.

[Edit 2]: I wrote to info@ycombinator.com as suggested below.

Also, thank you all very much for your advice, even more for the one of the "hard to swallow" type.

25 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] thread
sp332
Your account isn't "dead". That error sounds like the domain of the site you're submitting is banned. What's the URL?
trumbitta2
The URL I submitted is the official release announcement: http://www.entando.com/portal/pages/en/homepage/view/?conten...
eitally
You should really find someone with English fluency to help with copy editing. The English is so bad I -- if I were going to spend company money -- wouldn't even consider it due to lack of perceived professionalism. Note: we were recently considering portal options for our intranet (Joomla, Drupal, etc) and went with Drupal.
arethuza
I noticed some quite interesting stuff that is dead e.g.

"Show HN: Planck Cosmic Microwave Background visualised using three.js"

http://thecmb.org/

Which looks rather cool as I'd never heard of three.js:

http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/

Edit: Can't get over the fact that this editor is in a browser in JavaScript:

http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/editor/

dageshi
Yeah I saw that one dead yesterday as well, thought it was unusual. Noticed the user account that submitted it wasn't very old, just created in fact. Presumed that was the cause.
crimsonzagar
In my case it so happened when I tried submitting a link about a post I'd written, it said: "Your account is too new to post that website".

Which sort made me think, sort of panic, that either the link was unwelcome or I was. Obviously I was unwelcome given that the website (a blog post) I wanted to share had already shown up at HN on earlier occasions positively.

Then I posted the URL through my bosses' account which is relatively HN matured. But then his HN_id got all the up-votes (which he obviously didn't want to acquire) but meh?

That post went to no. 3 spot on the top threads, and I still feel the pinch that HN did not give me a fair chance. Sorry, did not want to write this way, but this is what happened to me. And this is the first HN_id I ever created only after reading it for months. I like being here.

petercooper
There's a lot of awesome/interesting/worthwhile stuff that gets nowhere on HN. I subscribe to the 'firehose' account on Twitter and get to see a lot of it. The front page of HN could be at least 3x longer and still be of high quality.
lifeisstillgood
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you are asking about moderator decisions the place to ask is info@ycombinator.com - it's gotten quick and intelligent replies to me when I asked.

I suspect that it has something to do with a very busy time for YC and the landing page you linked to looks like a bad Spanish SME selling something to clueless small businesses - I had to scroll all the way down to find you are actually open source and on GitHub

I am not saying you are the above - just your website does not sell you very well. I would look at Drupal.org for inspiration perhaps - emphasise community and open source - and really really really dump the semi-porn surprised looking woman and laptop. 99dollars on 99 designs will do far far more - or just ask on HN lots of good designers around who may be willing to help

lukeholder
I was just about to say the same thing. The stock photo looks ammeter and spammy. That linked page looks like a template. The home page of the domain looks great and I would have linked to that with treating it more like a launch.

Also, there does not seem to be anything groundbreaking or 'newsworthy' about the submission. You are just looking to get your product more customers, not looking to start a discussion.

trumbitta2
"Also, there does not seem to be anything groundbreaking or 'newsworthy' about the submission. You are just looking to get your product more customers, not looking to start a discussion."

Well, I think I have even more to learn about HN and netiquette in general. The original post was a "Show HN" ... what I was supposed to write to start a discussion?

lukeholder
How about making it a launch announcement and not just a feature update page? Your product is not a large popular project like coffeescript or ruby, thus version update announcements for products like yours are not newsworthy.

Maybe if your product is groundbreaking or has a unique value proposition would not be marked as spam.

lifeisstillgood
Tell your story

I never dig in to your about page but you have seemingly taken a journey that is in itself iteresting to HN - you started working at company X and wrote some OSS software that was useful. You and others kept improving it at nights I guess, then it broke out of one company and is used at many - how did that happen? Who is the customer you realised it was not just friends and family.

You set up on your own - a big thing round here, and you did so supporting OSS software.

If you want some interest can I suggest a three part blog post on how you and your team got started, when you broke out of just the one company and when you broke into a start up - and keep it about you and your colleagues - the actual product is a mcguffin - only tell us the parts about the pAinful lessons of test coverage or the inabity to remotely diagnose that meant a 2 am drive to another city

Tell us your story.

And redo that template :-)

niggler
"The stock photo looks ammeter"

I wonder what an ohmmeter stock photo looks like ...

peejaybee
I'm going to try and resist the potential pun chain here.
trumbitta2
thank you for your advice, I just wrote to info@ycombinator.com
anthonyb
There are all sorts of anti-troll, anti-spam and anti-voting ring measures in HN. Two that I know of, having run into them:

If you get too many friends/new accounts to upvote a story that you've submitted, it'll assume that there's collusion and your story will get killed off the front page.

You can't submit a story with the word 'troll' in it (this probably applies to other words too).

In your case, it's possibly the words 'enterprise' and 'portal' in the title/URL. Based on what I can see from the link that you've posted, it may be right, ie. enterprise portal solutions are not usually HN fodder unless there's an interesting twist to them.

trumbitta2
In fact, the "Reinvented" is the keyword here.

That's really the point, because Entando is not an Enterprise Portal as in Oracle Portal or whatever "slow and heavy" thing the word Portal may recall.

[Edit: typo, think --> thing]

batgaijin
Please don't question decisions that have been made for you, and have a nice day.
Ygg2
Silly question time. What does being [dead] mean? Banned?
mkr-hn
It means your comments will only show to people who've enabled showdead. Sometimes the bans are hilariously off the mark. It's known as a hellban.
ErikAugust
"The Entando platform was born in 2005 as an open source software called "jAPS" .

The software was initially employed by its creators and it started soon to be adopted by other organizations.

The Entando company was founded in 2009 by the founders of the project with the aim to help our partner network to build faster tailor-made solutions for their customers.

Our team believes in delivering superior quality product and support for our customers through technological innovation and partnerships.

Our Mission

The Entando Company exists to make simplier, essential and faster building the next-generation of enterprise-class portals"

Maybe you want to finish your About page?

klez
Since you are reading here, the "powered by" link at the bottom of your pages seems a bit messed up. Check it out.
trumbitta2
thank you! somebody's fixing it right now!