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Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

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Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#21

Post by jackfranklin »

DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #17
jackfranklin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-) Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app? EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

> In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)

Yes - there is already a flag for this in the model, but the functionality on the front-end to mark it as complete didn't get finished (yet).

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#22

Post by danielrmay »

Great idea, novel execution.

However - you might want to stick some validation or a moderation step in: the first in the list is currently "necenzurat is looking for help with getting laid. In return, they can offer their help with massage.".

Unless, of course, that is the real underlying intention of the app...

EDIT: After a short think, I think it would be nice to use a similar auto-complete "tag" entry system a la Stack Overflow. This would make entering any number of skills a great deal easier than just a text field.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#23

Post by jackfranklin »

danielrmay wrote: post #22

Great idea, novel execution. However - you might want to stick some validation or a moderation step in: the first in the list is currently "necenzurat is looking for help with getting laid. In return, they can offer their help with massage.". Unless, of course, that is the real underlying intention of the app... EDIT: After a short think, I think it would be nice to use a similar auto-complete "tag" entry system a la…

Yup - spotted and deleted that one.

I think we need some form of being able to flag an entry as spam, and it going into moderation when that happens.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#24

Post by grumps »

I like this... I was just thinking about last night how it would be nice if I could just swap with someone.

I would note you might want to protect against things like "help me get laid" I see it it on the homepage just a moment ago. while a legit request, you'll likely lose users over it. I can imagine there will be other crazy and illegal requests too.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#25

Post by jackfranklin »

grumps wrote: post #24

I like this... I was just thinking about last night how it would be nice if I could just swap with someone. I would note you might want to protect against things like "help me get laid" I see it it on the homepage just a moment ago. while a legit request, you'll likely lose users over it. I can imagine there will be other crazy and illegal requests too.

Agreed - going to add some system to enable people to flag entries as spam, at which point they will be removed and undergo moderation.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#26

Post by danielrmay »

chrismorgan wrote: post #18
jackfranklin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process: 1. Call me _________ 2. Refer to me as ( ) male ("he") ( ) female ("she") (x) gender-neutral or plural ("they") ( ) actually, we're a group ("they") For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username…

I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder".

This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#27

Post by snoonan »

jackfranklin wrote: post #15
chrismorgan wrote: post #13

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

You can try to avoid it grammatically.

@person is looking for help with PHP. In return, @person can help with CSS.

I like this because it means each sentence is meaningful out of context and can be separately indexed, searched, etc.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#28

Post by kivikakk »

chrismorgan wrote: post #13

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

It's probably just be the circles you travel in, but to me it wasn't jarring whatsoever. (I use the singular they in any case when I'm referring to someone whose gender I don't know/a hypothetical person where gender doesn't come into it, or if that's what they want me to use!)

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#29

Post by DjangoReinhardt »

jackfranklin wrote: post #20
DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-) Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app? EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

The entire source code is on my GitHub account: https://github.com/jackfranklin/skillswap It uses the free Heroku instance with the free MongoHQ addon. That way if the site failed completely I wouldn't be out of pocket! If it keeps being used we'll either stump up some cash for Heroku or look at other hosting options. For now the free Heroku is fine, and the free MongoHQ addon still has enough space, particularly as…

For a few-hour hack, it has been done quite beautifully, I must say. Kudos!

I'm more of a Django/Python guy myself and I've been running a few of my own self-learning projects on Heroku, too. So yeah, I know where you're coming from. :)

You might want to look into using Bootstrap Typeahead.js to auto-tag topics posted by users. I recently got it working with a bit of jQuery on one of my own projects by using Django Rest Framework to serve the corresponding JSON content. It may even help you auto-match users in the future! (I'd like my ESOPs now, please. :P)

I wish I knew how to Rails, but I've only just begun with Django, so I suspect I may not be of much use to you with the code. :(

Good luck, and may this project take you places! :)

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