New App - Looking for Feedback (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

Hey everyone,

I’m a fellow reefer in Cypress and have been working on a new website to make buying and selling coral a better experience. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is how scattered everything is - between vendor sites, forums, and social media, it can be tough to find the right frags. So, I built Meta Reef (https://metareef.com) to simplify the process and bring everything into one place.

The site is still in development, and I’d love to get some early feedback from the community. If you have a few minutes to check it out, I’d really appreciate your thoughts - whether it’s about the design, features, or anything you think could be improved.

Right now, I’ve added a few vendor sites to get things started, and I’m working on adding another ~10 this week. But I’d love to get more individual sellers on board so I can better organize listings to make it easier for buyers to find local sellers/corals.

Besides browsing listings, you can also message other users with live chat, manage your own listings, save and share listings, and filter corals by location (within 10 miles, for example). My goal is to build something that truly helps the reefing community, and your input would be awesome.

Even if you don't have feedback, I'd still love to connect with more local reefers, so send a message and say hi.

Thanks in advance, and happy reefing!

Jon

 

[frankc]

Not sure how I missed this post until today. Your site is pretty cool. I tried typing "acanthophyllia" and it pulled up 16 examples from multiple vendors before I could finish typing. I haven't tried the various filters, just typing specific things, but it seems to work very well and very fast.

 

[gregg]

im impressed how you have it pulling content from multiple vendors...nice job!

 

[Jon]

Not sure how I missed this post until today. Your site is pretty cool. I tried typing "acanthophyllia" and it pulled up 16 examples from multiple vendors before I could finish typing. I haven't tried the various filters, just typing specific things, but it seems to work very well and very fast.

Thanks! I appreciate that, and I’m glad it was quick for you.

I’ve got another batch of vendors being added over the next week, so there will be even more options for people when searching.

What I’m really excited about is seeing individual hobbyists list their frags. The site is ready—it’s just a matter of getting the word out!

Is there anything you wish another app/website had already done or did better? Tank profiles with test/parameter logs, LFS finder, etc.

 

[Jon]

im impressed how you have it pulling content from multiple vendors...nice job!

Thanks for the kind words gregg! Your websites are awesome and were fun to learn about.

There's a pretty cool tool running behind the scenes to keep everything up to date and find new listings throughout the day - a miniature google-ish indexer for reefs.

 

[foos]

As someone that does support for websites I ask that you please limit anything you use to get the data from vendor sites to something like one page load every 15 seconds, or ideally make it wait longer. So many sites are on servers that cannot handle a lot of traffic and when a bot starts to crawl them the server gets taken out.

 

[Jon]

As someone that does support for websites I ask that you please limit anything you use to get the data from vendor sites to something like one page load every 15 seconds, or ideally make it wait longer. So many sites are on servers that cannot handle a lot of traffic and when a bot starts to crawl them the server gets taken out.

Hey there! Thanks for the insight. When crawling, it consumes a very minimal amount of data (much less than a single page load from normal traffic) and does so on a much longer time frame so servers aren't ever in danger of being overloaded. That's a great thing to think about though and I really appreciate the feedback.

 

[foos]

It is not just data/bw. A lot of sites are php based and compiled on load so it is cpu/ram that is usually the killer. As long as you keep your polling rate slower than double the time it takes to get all the data back you should be fine.

Take this forum for example, it takes on average one second to serve a page so if you crawl at a rate of less than one page per 2 seconds the server should have plenty of time to spawn processes, compile the data, send it to you, and close out those processes without anything stacking. However, if you did 10 polls per second you would risk them eating up cpu cycles causing the page loads to be longer than a second allowing your next 10 to stack and slow it even more, and so on until so many are stacked that the server runs out of ram.

 

[gregg]

you guys should really help maintain this forum... ya'll sure sound like you have a lot more insight than we do here. Looking for volunteers!!!! @foos @Jon

 

[Jon]

you guys should really help maintain this forum... ya'll sure sound like you have a lot more insight than we do here. Looking for volunteers!!!! @foos @Jon

- I'm always happy to help out if needed.

 

[foos]

@gregg I did offer at one point.

I'm not familiar with the specific forum software used but could spin up a test site on my k3s cluster to learn it if needed.

Is there a specific thing you are having issues with?

 

[reeftopia]

cool app even with all the sps listed still couldnt find my blue stag. sold at least 100 frags off that colony and never seen it since.

 

[gregg]

@gregg I did offer at one point.

I'm not familiar with the specific forum software used but could spin up a test site on my k3s cluster to learn it if needed.

Is there a specific thing you are having issues with?

not really any issues at all... it just hasnt had a tune-up in a long while. its been running on auto-pilot.

 

[foos]

That is fine to do for the most part. If the site is on a VPS/Dedicated server you need to make sure the OS updates are running and you are not on an EOL OS. For the site itself you just need to make sure the site software and any plugins are kept up to date. Being a little behind is not a big deal unless there was a security patch for something being actively exploited, but getting too far behind can cause the site to get stuck and need to be re-done. Most site software will only keep one or two old versions install files live, so if you end up with a site even older you may no longer be able to get the files to upgrade to the next version.

 

[gregg]

That is fine to do for the most part. If the site is on a VPS/Dedicated server you need to make sure the OS updates are running and you are not on an EOL OS. For the site itself you just need to make sure the site software and any plugins are kept up to date. Being a little behind is not a big deal unless there was a security patch for something being actively exploited, but getting too far behind can cause the site to get stuck and need to be re-done. Most site software will only keep one or two old versions install files live, so if you end up with a site even older you may no longer be able to get the files to upgrade to the next version.

are you familiar with xenforo?

 

[foos]

are you familiar with xenforo?

I have not used it but I am familiar with WHM/cPanel setup and management.

 

[BSimon]

Your app is fantastic! Thanks for creating it

 

[Jon]

Your app is fantastic! Thanks for creating it

Thanks for the kind words! I'm finishing up tank profiles and alerts for corals / prices so you can get notified when something matches what you're looking for is found.

Let me know if you ever have something you'd like to see added.