I'm making a guestbook website!
Heya!
As I mentioned previously, I'm working on a guestbook website :3 Things are coming along pretty great! No guarantees on getting it done this month, but I'm making pretty decent progress! Also, i recently got help from dabi, so things are moving a tad faster now.
Here's what I've got implemented so far:
- Custom CSS
- Export your guestbook data in JSON, CSV and HTML at the click of a button
- Account deletion button that deletes everything associated with your account (I can't believe this is rare enough to be a feature and not just the bare minimum, but that's the world we're living in)
- in general, if you delete something it is gone. I don't store more data than i have to.
- A privacy policy (WIP still, will obviously be done by the time i release this though)
- Basic captchas that work without js and don't sell your data to a 3rd party
- Approval only mode for guestbooks, where every entry is hidden by default unless you manually approve them
- The ability to add a description to your guestbook that anyone can see before they comment - Thanks, dabi! (good for adding your own rules or just giving your guestbook some personality)
- A code of conduct clearly stating what kind of speech is and isn't allowed on the platform, that will have clear examples for each rule (TLDR: don't be homophobic/transphobic/racist/etc, don't encourage self-harm, don't do anything obviously illegal)
- decent admin tools that will allow me to actually enforce that code of conduct
- either GPLv3 or MIT (still working out the details) so you can self-host if you don't want me having control over the data or you ever disagree with how i run the platform
- actual instructions on how to self-host
- the service stores as little data as i can reasonably get away with (no google analytics/etc.)
- Two factor authentication
- The Ui looks like bearblog - again, thank you dabi for helping out with the CSS
- The website won't suddenly lose your comment if you accidentally refresh the page. It'll stay there until you hit send. No more writing 2000 word guestbook entries and accidentally losing everything because you fat-fingered the refresh gesture on mobile.
Making guestbooks will be invite-only so i can ensure that the platform doesn't grow way too big and I'll be able to afford running the thing. I'm also not using any SAAS pay-as-you-go BS for the hosting, so this thing won't be able to accidentally bankrupt me. It's also written in php, using laravel, meaning that the chance of anything vital this depends on getting deprecated is very low.
In the very unlikely case something goes wrong and the site shuts down permanently - exporting all your data is very fast & easy, and you should be doing that regularly no matter what service you use. (As previously mentioned though, I've made sure that the tech here is going to last, and the costs for running this thing on my end will always be a fixed, very low amount of money. There might be some downtime, but i don't see this going down permanently.)
In the future, i might also add a feature that auto exports all your data periodically and sends you an email with the exported files as attachments.
This isn't live yet, and when it does go live I'll probably keep invites exclusively to friends for a week or two to make sure nothing goes wrong. But, when i eventually publish this for real and am ready to send out invites to more people, I'll make a blog post announcing this. Be patient though, I've got a job and also finals are coming up, so things will get very busy for me in the foreseeable future.
Anyways, if you've got any questions, email me. I might do another post going over things in more detail tomorrow and showing off some pictures of the UI.