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stabubble / stabubbleweb

st andrews anonymous chat web app: using react, firebase hosting, realtime database and cloud functions
https://stabubble.web.app
MIT License
5 stars 0 forks source link

Improve invite code experience #30

Open adam-binks opened 3 years ago

adam-binks commented 3 years ago

The site is for anonymous posting, but if you live out of halls you need to (non-anonymously) ask a friend for a code! This seems less anonymous, and might discourage people from using the site.

I thought of a workaround for this: have an email address which, if you email it from a st-andrews.ac.uk email address, replies automatically with a unique code. You could only give out a code once for each email address, to prevent abuse where someone sent many emails to get many codes. On the other hand, this does require storing the email addresses of users.

Or...

A similar alternative approach: on the site, you can enter your St Andrews email address, and the system emails a unique code to that address. Downside: emails could start getting marked as spam, though this seems unlikely.

What do you think?

yryo617 commented 3 years ago

Former approach is probably more preferable—replies aren't often spam filtered (University is more aggressive with spam filters from services like sendgrid). We could just allocate cooling off period, then block if it's too much. So we only store those who are aggressive long-term and if not, just temporary to rate limit.