3 Days ago I launched hackertrackr and since that time 300 y combinator readers have submitted their information in order for other readers to find them. The problem now is how do those readers communicate with each other in a public forum? Since I launched I have received quite a few emails asking for a forums or comments feature where users can post meeting times, etc. The dilemma is how do I verify the user posting the comment is indeed the y combinator user they say they are. I see only one possible solution, but am hoping you all might be able to come up with more. If everyone would post their email address in some form of standardized format on their y combinator user info page, then I could write a script to send a password to that email address. They could then sign in to the forum section (yet to be built) on hackrtrackr with a their y combinator user name and the password provided and then switch the password to whatever they want.<p>Any other ideas?<p>Having some type of system like this would also be helpful for other people who have ideas for third party apps that are targeted toward y combinator readers.
Along the same lines as your email scraping idea you could have users create accounts at your site and give them some string to put into their news.yc profile to prove they own that news.yc account. To make it worth their wild the string could be, say, a link that resolves to a map of their location on hackrtrackr.
we could add more info to the profile for you to scrape to make this more useful, I suggest something along the lines of the following csv:<p>email,age,project status<p>email: something as simple as rot13 for security could be more than enough. It doesn't have to stay on our profiles indefinitely.<p>age:could be relevant information I think<p>project status: where we could maybe have something like 0=(no project/looking for project) 1=(working on project/looking for co-founder)<p>I think that and a forum (maybe phpBB?) would be more than enough. Where your script just creates our account with info in phpBB or whichever you decide to use and sends us the email for confirmation.<p>P.S. dottertrotter: kudos on this man!
If users trust you with their passwords, you can use the HTTP Identity API provided by news.yc. That is submit a POST directly to the login page (y?u=username&p=password, but POSTed). If "Bad login." is in the resulting page, that's not them.