Frustrating First Time IndieHackers Experience + SPAM
Last night I got an email from IndieHackers titled "Grow your audience by building in the open". It suggested sharing my progress by adding a milestone, so I decided to try that. This was my first time sharing a milestone on IndieHackers.
After spending about half an hour writing down the story, I wanted to add some emojis to make it a bit more visually appealing. In Windows, you bring up the Emoji keyword by pressing Win + ., and make it go away by pressing the Escape key. 😊
Apparently, pressing the "Escape" key also focuses the button that cancels the new milestone. Before I realized this, I hit the space bar. aaand...
My last half hour of work was gone. Just like that, without any warning, and without any way to undo the accidental click. 🤦♂️
I spent another half hour sharing again my new milestone, as I thought the story could be interesting for the community here, and I may get some feedback from people interested in Arduino or launching open-source products.
This morning, I had a spike of hope when I received an email that said: "I saw you on IndieHackers (congratulations!)"
Apparently, it was just someone who pitch their service to me, and probably hasn't even read what I posted. It felt like an automated email that is sent to everyone who posts their first milestone. 😞
Sorry if this came out as a rant, and feel free to delete this post if it doesn't add any value. I hope that sharing my experience here will help to address these issues and make the IndieHackers site more friendly for newcomers.
Ouch.
I know it doesn't help for the content you lost. But, when writing anything longer than a couple of lines into an online text editor, not just on Indie Hackers, I almost always open my own editor to draft it there so that I can save it. When I'm ready to publish, I copy the text and paste it into the online editor.
That's a good tip, thanks Paolo! I'll start applying it moving forward...
I learned it the hard way, too.
Sorry! That's my bad. On Macs you can also bring up an emoji selector with a keyboard shortcut and then press escape to make it go away, but that doesn't have the effect of also pressing escape on the text box, too, which would be like pressing escape twice. Surprising to me that's how it works on Windows. Regardless, I should add an extra warning popup after you press the cancel button when creating a milestone.
As for the email, that's unfortunate. If you forward it to me (courtland@indiehackers.com), I can see who's spamming people and discipline their account.
Thanks for looking into that! An alternative solution would just be to store the text in the browser's
localStorageor similar, and bring it up if you create the milestone again. I noticed that you are already doing this for the comments here, I can see my comment saved there as I type it now :-)I have some more UX feedback for IH, where is the best channel to share this feedback?
As for the email, sure, it's in your inbox now.
Just make a post in the Meta group whenever you have some feedback!
As for the spammer, hit "spam" on your email client especially Gmail, enough people joining and others won't get the same experience.
Good idea, just did it! Thanks :)