Major Updates, SMS Verification and more

Three days has passed after the initial announcement of @hiveonbaord and let me say that I'am overwhelmed from all the positive feedback we got from all of you!

A lot of stuff has happened and I've worked hard to improve the project in many aspects. In this post the most important changes will be covered first and we'll take a look at the near future.

Updates & Improvements

Improved Landing Page & More Content

It turned out quickly that hiveonboard.com could provide even more use-cases for people interested in HIVE. So what I did here was to divide the website into three use-cases:

• Learn
  This section will filled with a lot of high quality content when it comes to learn about HIVE. Why is HIVE so awesome? Why should people invest in HIVE? Ho does HIVE work? All those questions should be answered in a really user-friendly way. Adding content to this section is on my road map but not the highest priority at the moment.
• Get Onboard
  This is the easy "Create Account" Flow which many of you already know from the Introduction Post. The use-case already was improved a lot - more on this later.
• Explore
  This section will hold information about dApps and trusted HIVE services like @blocktrades, @giftgiver or other exchanges like stealthex.io which was suggested to me. Improving this section will be an ongoing task for me.

Improved UI for dApps

I wasn't really happy about how dApps were presented to the user in the first release, so I've redesigned it a little bit to make it look more appealing. The list is still incomplete but there is also a plan in mind: @therealwolf is running hivedapps.com which also provides an API which will become very handy for hiveonboard.com because in a later state of the app all data will be pulled from there and all other available dApps will be listed automatically.

Added Analytics & Brave Support

In order to provide valuable feedback to HIVE ad-campaigns in the future Google Analytics was added to gather information about user of this app. I'll share this data with the community if there is any demand from a marketing point of view. At this point, a lot of more data has to be gathered.

The website was added to BRAVE as an "Verified Creator" - so people are free to contribute BAT token.

Major Rework on Create Account Feature

The most time spent over the last few days was without a question on the main use-case here.

Lessons learned about abuse

A few hours after the introduction post of this service got on trending an attacker already worked around the IP address block on account creation and sadly consumed over a hundred account account creation tickets. I'am very sorry that this happened. In the second I recognized what happened - the service was put on pause until security further anti abuse mechanics were deployed.

If interested, all accounts created by this service are reported on a daily basis. @themarkymark already reported to me that those accounts try to fake other well know community member, so please beware.

The accounts are listed here: Accounts Created on Day 1
If somebody wants to go into investigation, I could provide IP addresses for each shady account created.

SMS Verification to the Rescue

Since the service should stay without a paywall, I considered either E-Mail or SMS verification in order to reduce the risk of abuse. The choice was made to go for SMS One-Time-Code verification, which comes with a solid investment for each abuse.

All countries are supported and the fee for running this service will covered by me for now. If we will see thousands of sign-ups each day - I'll consider putting up a proposal for covering the service fees.

Improved Flow and Security

Last but not least, the account creation flow was changed after I got some feedback from you:

• Account Creation on the chain will happen after the user has secured his keys and verified in step two instead creating an account in step one. I've learned that this is best practice by almost all other services out there.
• Another big learning for me was, that the account creator doesn't have to obtain the password or the private keys from the account to be created. So from now on the password and private keys will be generated on the client-side only and the back-end will only be provided by username and public keys to broadcast the account creation op.
• In case the service runs out of account creation tickets - the user is hinted to visit signup.hive.io to look for an alternative account creation service available.

Next Steps

The next big goal for this service is to solve issue having a very small supply of account creation tickets.

Therefore a really great solution is already been worked out and will be released very soon in an upcoming post. One thing I can promise you right now is that the service will easily capable of supporting small- to mid range ad-campaign on social media for example.

HIVEers who wanna go for marketing and onboard fresh blood should prepare their campaigns right now!

Specials Thanks

At this point I'll point a huge thanks to all of you, who supported this project.

There are a couple of people who deserve a special mention here:

• @xxxxxxxxxx, @bank.sbd, @eturnerx, @fw206 and @shmoogleosukami for delegating HP
• @crimsonclad for talking about it in her show last saturday on mspwaves.com and spreading the word
• @nateaguila for creating the stunning hive-social-kit which was used in this project (HIVE Social Kit)
• At least another two very important persons, who will be introduced in the next upcomming update (hope those two know that I'am talking about you)

Read you very soon!
PEACE, LOVE AND ME