Currently I'm using a code method, where registration requires a "code". I share this code lightly, and can change it at any time. Plus there's a re-captcha in both register and login pages to annoy abusers a bit more.
Things I learned after getting users
111–120 of 155 posts
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#112"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…
An alternative to learning SQL is to use a non relational database, that has more of a impedance match to your host language to start with. (Eg XTDB or another Datalog DB in case of Clojure)
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#113"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…
Honestly, I started on the ORM hate train when I first started and wrote my own queries in an effort to be "performant", but my frankenstein of writing direct queries and abstracting code to be reusable became basically a super shitty ORM that was a nightmare to maintain for a large codebase lol. I don' think there's anything wrong with it and for 90% of CRUD actions it's what you should choose. By the time you hit p…
Yeah, I am old enough to have started back when ORM did not existed yet. World with actual tested ORM is way more maintennable, waaay more easy to deal with. You can write your own queries when you really need to ... but should do it only when you really really need to.
Writing queries is easy part. Maintaining that thing is the hard part.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#114"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…
It's hard to explain to developers why an ORM isn't really that great of a solution....but at a high level: * your database is the core of your app. Abstraction implies that you don't care about the details of your data store, which eventually will lead to two major problems: 1. When things are slow you won't be able to debug it, because you're abstracted away your database and don't understand what queries your ORM…
Ad2: Every single real world java project I have seen used hibernate (ORM) with flyway. I never ever seen any project in production where some underlying tech would be deleting tables autonomously.
Ad1: People do debug ORMs, actually. Including queries effectivity.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#115> when the site first got a surge of users from hacker news, there was one poster in particular who came to the site, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to post and create threads that were just full of dumb slurs. this was definitely a learning experience because i had to act quickly, so i tried a bunch of different methods to get rid of him. it's sad that people like this exist in the w…
The thing that really surprised me was that even when he implemented IP blocking, the user used a VPN to continue abusing the site. That's a step beyond "casual" trolling that someone might do to test a site's security (not that this is justifiable behavior) and enters the territory of targeted harassment.
I don't find it surprising. This happens in every project I run. It's almost a guarantee that when you ban someone they will come back with a new account and when you ban their IP they start using VPNs. It's such a common occurrence and they get more aggressive for every step where they consider it a victory when you manually take action against them. I often need to resort to banning whole IP ranges.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#116"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…
What do you think of "micro ORMs" like knex.js, or Dapper for C#? I personally agree with you and my personal projects just use stored procedures, but these micro orms have always piqued my interest since they're just a SQL abstraction for building single queries.
I personally like those. They are qualitatively different from ORMs. They give you three things:
- sensible ways of composing queries beyond direct string concatenation
- safe parametrization
- return results into usable data structures (not objects)
None of these things carry the problems of ORMs. They don’t impose a paradigm that isn’t SQL. They simply let you interface with SQL in an ergonomic manner.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#117"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…
I'm pretty proficient with SQL, and I completely agree that you need to know it well if you use a relational DB for something that isn't trivial, but I still love using ActiveRecord. In most web applications I worked on I needed to manually optimise some queries, either massaging AR a bit or directly writing SQL when necessary, but I would say that's much less than 1% of all interactions with the DB. In all the other situations, using AR saved me a lot of time.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#118> when the site first got a surge of users from hacker news, there was one poster in particular who came to the site, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to post and create threads that were just full of dumb slurs. this was definitely a learning experience because i had to act quickly, so i tried a bunch of different methods to get rid of him. it's sad that people like this exist in the w…
> what could possibly motivate someone to spend their time doing this? Probably being between the ages of 10-14 years old. Bartle Killer-explorer?
The hardcore persistent trolls making it their life's mission to ruin my site have always been 20+ after I've managed to identify them. Kid trolls just spam, get banned and move on.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#119>listen to your users. they might have better ideas than you! So true. My products have improved greatly from listening to (some!) user feedback.
If you can recognize good feedback and manage expectations well.
From a user’s perspective there is typically a tipping point for a thing that becomes popular enough where user feedback becomes useless, superficial, lowest common denominator crap, which doesn’t understand the value prop, the quality standards and the implications of change vs stability.
I believe this type of feedback often bubbles up for similar reasons bikeshedding can become a problem, which is then perpetuating through social media.
At this point one needs a filter.
Re: Things I learned after getting users
#120> when the site first got a surge of users from hacker news, there was one poster in particular who came to the site, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to post and create threads that were just full of dumb slurs. this was definitely a learning experience because i had to act quickly, so i tried a bunch of different methods to get rid of him. it's sad that people like this exist in the w…
i'm more sad to see founders repeatedly put out ugc-oriented software or communities without any design priority for safety. safety is the hard part of ugc products but is left to figure out after scale and ossification.
How would you plan for 'safety' in UGC-oriented software? I'm actually interested in this.