Ask HN: Review my site - Ollawalla

[dosberg]

I'm just now starting to put my site in front of people and a colleague recommended posting it here.

http://ollawalla.com

I'm looking for feedback on: - the idea - branding - user experience

Thx!

Ollawalla is an online trading post where you can find the things you want by trading the stuff you no longer need. You might find free furniture in your city or trade your used computer for a new kayak. Ollawalla brings us back to our cultural roots, before the days of mega malls and when people simply exchanged goods and services with the people in their community. By using technology and social media, we make it fun and easy to trade online with your friends and neighbors.

[tylerwl]

Along with the two options that pop up when "Choose your nearest city" is clicked, how about a third like:

Don't see a city close to you?

This option could then take the user to a page where they can submit their city & email. I think this would help you make the most of your traffic and also provide some guidance when you're trying to decide where to expand to next.

[dosberg]

tylerwl, great idea. The select box on the homepage only shows cities that have posts. Since the site doesn't have many postings I thought this would be a better experience. This way users don't end up on blank city pages. Thx!

[mike-cardwell]

If I go to http://www.ollawalla.com/feed?city=foobar and look at the source code of the page I see a MySQL error. That's never a good sign.

[mike-cardwell]

You only offer Facebook and Twitter logins. tab closed

[dosberg]

Mike, a big part of the idea is trading within your social networks. This removes the layer of anonymity.

[dangrossman]

Craigslist does that with phone verification. You have to take a call or SMS with a code to enter on the website before you can post in a high-spam-risk category. That ties accounts to phone numbers which creates a much higher barrier to re-registration than just e-mail addresses or Facebook profiles, and makes the account traceable if authorities need to get involved.

That's part of the reason I created http://www.dialshield.com, a widget/API that lets anyone add phone verification to their website the same way Craigslist does.

[mike-cardwell]

The site doesn't look like it's limited to trading within social networks, so why limit logins in that way? If you expect this to stamp out abuse, it's not going to. People can just register for a new facebook/twitter account and then use that...

[dosberg]

Good point Mike. I'll likely add the ability to login without facebook/twitter in the future. Thanks again for your feedback.

[tstegart]

I'm with the above poster, I generally avoid Facebook logins.

[mike-cardwell]

Basic XSS flaw:

  http://www.ollawalla.com/browse?city=<script>alert("xss")</script>

[dosberg]

http://ollawalla.com

[tstegart]

Is the site down right now?

[zeynalov]

yes it is.

[dosberg]

Thanks for the feedback guys!