An Idea For a Site.
While I was walking home (past Vons to be exact) I thought of an idea for a web project. Yesterday, I posted about the yellow topped pepsis finally arriving in San Diego. I was thinking about my odds for winning and then, it came to me, how about a site that tracks people’s bottles. Of course it will be skewed (maybe extremely skewed) but it’s worth a try. Since I am in school and very busy, I would have to make it almost manage itself, or get a couple moderators for when I’m away.
I could give it an XML-RPC interface so people don’t have to go to the website every time you buy a new bottle. RSS could give you a bunch of statistics from, the average price of a bottle to the last 10 registered bottles. There could be a couple dynamic images so people could put the statistics on there own sites.
What could I do to limit the cheating? People would definitely try to get away with lying and faking their bottles. I could require them to include the barcode, but that would make it less convenient so people would forget about it and post less. Of course they would be required to log in. Requiring a valid email (testing it) would stop it a little, for the spammers and bots it would make registration harder. Writing scripts/programs that posted for people without a web browser would encourage more posting. I could track how many bottles somebody has registered versus how long they have been active, then if somebody has an excessively high average, I could pop over an email asking what the deal is. This could even be automated, if the average is over, say 10 or 20, or there has been a great spike in bottle registration on an account, then the system could send them a message, if they don’t reply, suspend the account. What would happen to their “bottles” then?
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p>This could have a lot more features too, there could be groups, and friends. You could have a “looked first” checkbox and see who is looking the most. Sounds like a great project, I’ll probably start it (if I haven’t decided it’s stupid) after spring break.