Three days has passed after the initial announcement of @hiveonbaord and let me say that I'am overwhelmed from all the positive feedback we got from all of you!
A lot of stuff has happened and I've worked hard to improve the project in many aspects. In this post the most important changes will be covered first and we'll take a look at the near future.
Updates & Improvements
Improved Landing Page & More Content
It turned out quickly that hiveonboard.com could provide even more use-cases for people interested in HIVE. So what I did here was to divide the website into three use-cases:
- Learn
This section will filled with a lot of high quality content when it comes to learn about HIVE. Why is HIVE so awesome? Why should people invest in HIVE? Ho does HIVE work? All those questions should be answered in a really user-friendly way. Adding content to this section is on my road map but not the highest priority at the moment. - Get Onboard
This is the easy "Create Account" Flow which many of you already know from the Introduction Post. The use-case already was improved a lot - more on this later. - Explore
This section will hold information about dApps and trusted HIVE services like @blocktrades, @giftgiver or other exchanges like stealthex.io which was suggested to me. Improving this section will be an ongoing task for me.
Improved UI for dApps
I wasn't really happy about how dApps were presented to the user in the first release, so I've redesigned it a little bit to make it look more appealing. The list is still incomplete but there is also a plan in mind: @therealwolf is running hivedapps.com which also provides an API which will become very handy for hiveonboard.com because in a later state of the app all data will be pulled from there and all other available dApps will be listed automatically.
Added Analytics & Brave Support
In order to provide valuable feedback to HIVE ad-campaigns in the future Google Analytics was added to gather information about user of this app. I'll share this data with the community if there is any demand from a marketing point of view. At this point, a lot of more data has to be gathered.
The website was added to BRAVE as an "Verified Creator" - so people are free to contribute BAT token.
Major Rework on Create Account Feature
The most time spent over the last few days was without a question on the main use-case here.
Lessons learned about abuse
A few hours after the introduction post of this service got on trending an attacker already worked around the IP address block on account creation and sadly consumed over a hundred account account creation tickets. I'am very sorry that this happened. In the second I recognized what happened - the service was put on pause until security further anti abuse mechanics were deployed.
If interested, all accounts created by this service are reported on a daily basis. @themarkymark already reported to me that those accounts try to fake other well know community member, so please beware.
The accounts are listed here: Accounts Created on Day 1
If somebody wants to go into investigation, I could provide IP addresses for each shady account created.
SMS Verification to the Rescue
Since the service should stay without a paywall, I considered either E-Mail or SMS verification in order to reduce the risk of abuse. The choice was made to go for SMS One-Time-Code verification, which comes with a solid investment for each abuse.
All countries are supported and the fee for running this service will covered by me for now. If we will see thousands of sign-ups each day - I'll consider putting up a proposal for covering the service fees.
Improved Flow and Security
Last but not least, the account creation flow was changed after I got some feedback from you:
- Account Creation on the chain will happen after the user has secured his keys and verified in step two instead creating an account in step one. I've learned that this is best practice by almost all other services out there.
- Another big learning for me was, that the account creator doesn't have to obtain the password or the private keys from the account to be created. So from now on the password and private keys will be generated on the client-side only and the back-end will only be provided by username and public keys to broadcast the account creation op.
- In case the service runs out of account creation tickets - the user is hinted to visit signup.hive.io to look for an alternative account creation service available.
Next Steps
The next big goal for this service is to solve issue having a very small supply of account creation tickets.
Therefore a really great solution is already been worked out and will be released very soon in an upcoming post. One thing I can promise you right now is that the service will easily capable of supporting small- to mid range ad-campaign on social media for example.
HIVEers who wanna go for marketing and onboard fresh blood should prepare their campaigns right now!
Specials Thanks
At this point I'll point a huge thanks to all of you, who supported this project.
There are a couple of people who deserve a special mention here:
- @xxxxxxxxxx, @bank.sbd, @eturnerx, @fw206 and @shmoogleosukami for delegating HP
- @crimsonclad for talking about it in her show last saturday on mspwaves.com and spreading the word
- @nateaguila for creating the stunning hive-social-kit which was used in this project (HIVE Social Kit)
- At least another two very important persons, who will be introduced in the next upcomming update (hope those two know that I'am talking about you)
Read you very soon!
PEACE, LOVE AND ME
If i could upvote this a thousand times I would. This is some serious great work here. I think the sms code idea is pretty good, as many sites use this method to cut down (won't cut down on all tho). Did you have time to look into the way that Brave ads does the claim feature, by moving the triangle into a shape (to cut down on automated abuse)?
This is literally the most exciting aspect of recent activity, as onboarding needs the most work (and then retention after people swarm in). I'm working on tutorials right now that people who are new to Hive (and Steem) can use to get used to everything.
The biggest problems besides onboarding though is something i discovered a few days ago:
Most people use mobile, ie, the Esteem app and there is no way to join communities when using Esteem app. Also, another big probblem: there are a lot of peakd.com links contained in posts, and when someone is using the Esteem app on mobile, when they click on the peakd.com links within the Esteem app, it takes them out of the mobile app, and into a browswer. This is a really bad design.....
The mobile app needs to be streamlined, and not sure if the team is aware of this problem.......
Anyway, this is great work, and i look forward to seeing how this will be progressing, and if you need anything let me know.
I agree, it's really important to keep users excited after mobile on-boarding.
Hope those issues can be fixed by Esteem devs. @dapplr is comming anytime soon and has good chances to fill the mobile gap for us.
I'am pretty sure @peakd have a roadmap for mobile as well - maybe going for a progressive web app and store listing? We achieved really cool results after just a week of work on this project. Guess where we are in a few month :)
you're doing amazing. thank you for this. We will get there.
Nice! looking forward to future updates.
Alright, here we go!
I'll cover details on this tomorrow, in an upcomming post!
Or how Mr. Sun would say:
👍 That's a lot of accounts :D
A great update could be a blacklist of disposable phone numbers, I can provide you a list of the most public phone numbers that are working right now.
Hive a nice day!
Yeah sure that would be great!
I found a few blacklists on github but nothing really up2date.
hey,there's something like a referral code??
people who onboard people could set a referral code and they receive some delegated hive power per person, what do you think about this???
It would be great for this new site, like 3speak works with referral codes. At this time, you can delegate to your friends directly when they are onboard.
Hive a nice day!
As far as I understood some json_meta data is put into the account creation operation on the chain and frontends could send a small amount of posting rewards back to the referer.
This is an awesome feature if you ask me. Great idea.
We should discuss this with a greater audience first and reach consensus about the format of the json-meta data since we need some kind of standardization here.
I'll create a ticket for this great idea on the github repo. It's just a matter of time until it will be implemented I guess.
you had information about that referral code ?? thank you!.
Looking good!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 4/12)
Thank you!
Amazing work
Thank you VERY much!
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I should read this later.
I've been stumbling across accounts that were created without any HP delegation. These accounts are having a bear of a time.
They don't have enough resources to even find out that they don't have resources.
You get to write one post only to find out that you can't write a second.
I got a temporary delegation of 21 HP (for 1 week) using a bot on https://giftgiver.site when my resource credits were almost zero.
Take care my friend, I'll always appreciate your help.
Tremendous job ! I hope this helps people to join !
very interesting, i will try it...
You may contact someone about listing @hiveonboard at https://signup.hive.io/
Good jobs guys!! 💯
Would be nice to add a section for another type of apps... like games, explorers, wallets, etc.
Create a category of stuff...
It's on the roadmap and agree that those information are needed for new users.
Will take a look into hiveprojects.io since @noisy already did a really good job with this app & service directory.
Maybe we can work together here.
Yeap! =) let everyone know what kind of help. I am available on many places too.
wow, that is alot of improvements in 3 short days.
It is looking great.
We all appreciate your efforts to make on boarding secure & easier.
Great new features and anyone must love the SMS verification model which all the trusted entities use it at the moment. This makes it easier and more secure at the same time. Great work!
I am really very happy with HIVE! I would like to ask a question: the user name is that of STEEM, I would like to change it here on HIVE, is it possible to do this? 
The website looks good so far. Maybe after putting in more contents to it, you could do SEO to improve rankings, and more people might be able to discover this platform.
Awesome works :)
Securities ..securities ..securities . That is all i read now , when we enter the once private and free crypto world .
This is so great! Security should be the top priority among any software especially these days when so many people care about their data protection. I would only add some approaches for an enhanced security measures - https://topdevs.org/blog/web-and-mobile-app-security, they can protect both web and mobile solutions at the development stage. I believe it is better to prevent than combat the issues.