Services for the first one have been around since the beginning. There are 3 or 4 instances of such web services, most notably http://useqwitter.com
The idea of service+username@email.com subscription is utilized by many admins who run mail servers and demand granular control over whitelists. I do it with couple of my domains that have catch-all.
Here's my idea you guys could steal. I'm giving it away for free. A social network where you connect people with their friends and relatives. Now go build it!
Yeah I originally thought "making something similar and open-sourcing is probably not that evil", but looking at this it leverages the name you chose for Svbtle, the design is near (exactly?) pixel-perfect, it leverages the Kudos device, and apparently even copy/pastes code from the original.
If we think of Svbtle not as a blogging engine, but as a company with various commentators/channels, this is quite obviously ethically wrong, and possibly legally wrong (I can't imagine I'd last long making a site called "BBBC" and using all BBC branding).
Having said all that, it validates the demand for Svbtle - why not start charging for people to use the design (perhaps with some distinct branding to indicate they're not part of the official "Svbtle network").
// Some afterthoughts
It's clear that all design is about inspirations, and you can see the Drawar (http://drawar.com/) inspiration in Svbtle. However, just because Svbtle clearly has design influences doesn't mean simply copying Svbtle without making your own changes (just as Svbtle has) is okay, particularly when you are stealing their brand name as well.
I'm not sure if Svbtle itself is WP-based, or whether the admin section is similar, so perhaps some innovation has been made there? Nonetheless, an effort to distinguish itself (and potentially acknowledging the original influence) seems important.
This submission had 10 upvotes after just 10 minutes, while no other submissions on the new page have more than a handful of votes. Does HN have anything in place to detect people gaming the system through fake accounts or voting rings?
Yes, except that many websites (most?) erroneously forbid using a "+" sign in an email address. This drives me nuts but there's not much you can do. Sometimes I try to disable client-side validation, only to find that the check is performed again on the server.
It would be interesting to build a webmail service that would allow this same functionality with another character, maybe an underscore (of course that would mean that addresses could not contain underscores).
The other solution is to use Mailinator; but all email sent to it is public so it's less than ideal.
It's easy to just remove that +... part at the spammers side - I mean, it's the most common trick in the book, a spammer would have to be stupid not to handle that.
A great service to simplify and pinpoint spam sellers is http://leemail.com/ - I've been using it for a while and it's working great.
The idea of service+username@email.com subscription is utilized by many admins who run mail servers and demand granular control over whitelists. I do it with couple of my domains that have catch-all.
Here's my idea you guys could steal. I'm giving it away for free. A social network where you connect people with their friends and relatives. Now go build it!