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45 comments

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mindcrime
Not sure this is being used the way you expected / planned, but it's still pretty cool. :-)
drum
haha thanks! I can't say I didnt expect some "porn star" style requests
swat535
This is pretty fun, I just posted a random want, I dont know where this is going but it seems promising.
aitoehigie
what did you use to build this?
drum
Ruby on Rails, with the Sync Gem by Chris McCord and Pusher
sandbochs
Have you ever checked out Meteor? It'd be cool to implement this on it.
chrismccord
Thanks for the mention! I love seeing examples of what people are building out there. Some crafty visitor was spamming the list with scripted entries and the updates were buttery smooth :)
mvbrasil
this is really cool!
drum
thanks! now if only i can prevent the spam...
schleppy_oc
Why not just use a simple csrf stored in a session? You already have an "authenticiy_token" in the request data, why not use it, or add another value for csrf?
aviswanathan
Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to http://www.tweetspiration.com/. After putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd-supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?
drum
i like the comments idea!
jurassic
As much as it saddens me to say this, I think this needs a CAPTCHA to keep the "hackers" from spamming it to oblivion. Cool idea, though.
drum
its starting to seem that way.. thanks for the suggestion!
todd3834
don't captcha just rate limit by ip
jcla1
Great idea really! Just the spam is a problem...
ikonos_de
As a spam-filter to mail I want a spam-filter to aswhoiwant ;)
ArekDymalski
I guess that it isn't something you intended, but you've build great entertainment site. As your user I want you to archive these pearls of humour and let me upvote'em. Time to pivot ;)
codereflection
I've just been watching it for about 5 minutes, pretty entertaining actually.
riz_
Idea: if the "as a"-field starts with a vowel, change the "a" to "an".
zachgersh
Interesting to see the amount of different inputs that people are trying. Swastikas and attempts to DROP TABLE aplenty.
mwulfert
you should add an algorithm to filter out the spam and make an app out of this. you could change the theme every day, e.g. tomorrow it could be "if I had [..] I would [..]", etc.

can totally see this taking off

_lex
I like it. To limit spam, use twitter for auth and connect ideas to twitter profiles, then let people flag other people as spam - and hellban their account.

If you don't want auth, you can still just let people flag spam and hellban machines spitting out spam.

Edit: You can also use basic ratelimiting - maybe only allow 1 post per 10 seconds.

igravious
Just rate limit (one word, two words?) to 1 per 30 (10 seems not enough, dunno) seconds and not allow more than 3 of the same strings repeated sequentially.
miguelrochefort
I'm the 555 guy. Let's talk about semantic communication.
doki_pen
I tried testing some XSS stuff and got 500 errors, you might want to make sure you are catching encoded < > stuff
shawabawa3
I tried

    As a SQL injection, I want a '); DROP TABLE Statements;--
And got a 500 error... you might want to look into sanitizing the data
smaili
Wait you mean you really don't want to drop a table? Liar!!! :)
nickch
reproduced and confirmed.
jweese
Everyone's talking about auth to limit spam, but I think a more interesting approach is to let people click to flag spam, then train up a little naive Bayes classifier.
ComputerGuru
Did you release this anywhere else? I'd be appalled to learn all that foul language is coming from HN.

EDIT: Very sad. Nothing more to say.

drum
only on hacker news :)
gosu
My wants are not being acknowledged. I want to see my wants on the list.
drum
sorry, seems like the spammers are blocking some requests from hitting the Pusher api
nsomaru
phew, someone just automated it and is spamming you hard. this is interesting to watch, thanks :P
hashtree
Is it odd that I find the exercise to prevent the spam far more interesting than the product itself (not a criticism)? No traditional captchas, no oauth tie-ins... just good-old-fashion machine learning, graph analysis, hellbanning, negative captchas, etc
cadalac
Yeah, looks like a good technique for programmers to gain some experience : build a hacking magnet and defend it
mogi57
Methinks it needs a captcha...
Kapura
sounds like tailors want wang. Get on it, YC.