Introducing hiveonboard.com - free HIVE account creation service

in #hive4 years ago (edited)

Introduction

Greetings HIVE community,
my name is Christian better know as @roomservice on HIVE and wanna introduce you into a new project:

hiveonboard.com is a free-2-use HIVE account creation service, which is trying to improve the user experience when it comes to account creating and point users into our great world of dapps.

Looking at already available account creation services, me and other community members recognized that most available options either lack of a good user experience, have a paywall or even both.

This is project will try to solve this problems in the best possible way.

How it works from a new user perspective

1. Create your account

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User can easily try and find a username which is allowed to use on the HIVE blockchain.
The frontend will check if the username is compliant and also available. After a suitable username is found, a confirmation button has to be clicked to prevent accidently creating an account.

2. Backup your account

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After a few seconds the account creation is already done and the account credentials will be shown. The user has to download a backup file with his username, password and all private & public keys in this step. At this point it's a good idea to hint the user to those great tools like Keychain or Hivesigner in order to secure the account right in this moment.

3. Choose your dapp

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In the last step, we promise the new user to get a 100% upvote from @hiveonboard when the first post is done (not yet implemented). It's important to not loose the user yet, we just invested an account and have to point him to one of this great dapps out there in order to get him use HIVE as it's intended.

Below there is a list of dapps, which is currently work in progress. I've started with Peaked, Hive.blog, 3Speak and Esteem. If you wanna see your app appear in this list, just let me know and it will be added.

How it works behind the scenes

Account Creation

In order to onboard the masses and support HIVE ad campaigns all those new created accounts have to be funded in any kind of way.

Right now the HIVE blockchain offers two options when it comes to account creation:

  • Pay a fee for creating a new account (currently 3 HIVE which is set by witnesses)
  • Create from account tickets, which can be claimed using ressource credits

My goal here is to create accounts from account tickets because I don't see anyone spending ten-thousands of HIVE for onboarding new users. Therefore the account @hiveonboard will depend on HIVE POWER delegation from the community. I've made a start and delegated 10,000 HP from my private stake in order to slowly start generating account tickets.

Anyone can always check how many free accounts are still on stock hovering over "Service Available".
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For the first couple of days, not @hiveonboard but @roomservice will create new accounts, because I stockpiled some account creation tickets over month. If those tickets are consumed, it will be switched to @hiveonboard account and onboarding users on this service will only be limited in the HP delegated to this account.

I really hope that especially large stakeholders will realize how important it is to bring fresh blood to HIVE and will support this project with a HP delegation. More people on the chain means more investors on the chain, which will ultimately increase the value of HIVE. We really have to do achieve larger flow of new users comming in than our inflation of HIVE - otherwise the value of HIVE go down in the long-term.

Delegation aside this project will try to publish content regulary in order to hopefully see some post rewards which will be used for account creation and content curation as well.

Abuse Prevention

In order to stop people creating multiple accounts, the service will keep track of every ip address used for account creation and will throw an error message when somebody dares to abuse it.

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I totally understand that there are concerns that ip blacklisting will not be enough to prevent abuse.
From my point of view a paywall (even if it's a small one) will greatly slow down our HIVE population.

This is just a starting point, let's see how it turns out - we can always adapt.

Responsive Design

The ui was designed with the mobile first approach, so it's also perfectly suited for mobile devices.
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Tech-Stack

My ultimate goal, as a full-stack developer, when it comes to creating software solutions, is to spend most of my time in creating values and solving problems and not so much in managing servers and installing/configuring software. That's the reason why the project was build on public available open source libraries like ReactJS, hive-js or dhive and Google Firebase as a reliable service for infrastructure.

I've put the whole project open source in a GitHub Repository if anyone is interested in:

  • Reviewing the code
  • Contributing to the project
  • Submitting bugs and feature requests
  • Clone the project and create another account creation service based on the code

If this project qualifies, I'll apply at the Stemgeek's first hackathon (Link).
Still waiting for a response from @themarkymark on Discord, hopefully he won't ignore me.

Roadmap

I personally see much more potential in this project and there are a couple of things, which are still on my roadmap. This is just the beginning of this project. Here are some ideas for the roadmap:

  • Improving the project on community feedback
  • Creating proper documentation on GitHub
  • Auto-Voting on first post from new created accounts
  • Auto daily posts with stats about new created accounts
  • Create incentives for people who delegatore HP to @hiveonboard
  • Supporting ad-campaigns like my proposal for BRAVE browser ads

Asking for community support

As mentioned in the "Account Creation" chapter before, the project can only grow with your support.

If you like to support on-boarding new user to HIVE then feel free to delegate some HIVE POWER to @hiveonboard. Shout out at this point again to those large stakeholders who wanna see their net worth of HIVE increase - this is your opportunity to support onboarding the masses.

In case you are short of HP and delegation please help, spread the word and re-post this article.

Our best efforts on other social media streams like Twitter or Facebook could be so much more worth, when we can get more people on the Chain more easily in a user-friendly way.

A special thanks goes out to @stellabelle who was the person which brought up the whole idea for this project and gave me a lot of feedback.

Let me know what you think, I would love to hear your feedback.

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The idea making this tokens transferable was recently discussed here if interested: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/issues/35

Doesn't look like we'll see such a feature reading the ticket.

Delegation aren't provided yet - even with 0 HIVE POWER there is a pool of ressource credits which will make sure blockchain transactions can be done on a basic level. Do you see any downsides not providing initial delegations?

Do you see any downsides not providing initial delegations?

It severely limits the accounts. You could point users to https://giftgiver.site for free delegations for now until you can get your own delegation system setup.

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Really good idea -> Will do!

I understand that you may be using the delegated Hive power to give supportive initial upvotes, but I'd recommend also using it to supply small initial delegations of 5-10 HP. Until resource credits can be delegated independently, it makes sense to use your supporter delegations fully, and not let the HP go to waste. It could provide a much smoother first couple weeks for new users.

RC delegations should allow for that.

PR already merged and deployed. Thanks for contributing :)

dApp view still needs some more work from my side for better representing those awesome dApps out there.

The whole idea of tickets is stupid. If we're trying to get as many people on board as possible, even ensuring that it's free and easy, why limit signups at all?

I'm sure that looks great to outsiders. "Hey, we want you to join, but we're having trouble generating and transferring enough of the right kind of tickets within our code. Come back later for our FREE signup!"

There is one thing I thought you should know (if you don't know it already): When a brand new user creates a new Hive account with the Esteem app, they don't get any HP delegated to them, but they can still post, comment and vote a little bit. I think not having HP at the very beginning will be the thing that cuts down on hackers farming accounts for the free HP (since there is none). We don't want users to get stuck though, so maybe if we design some system for new users like this:

  1. Write an #introduceyourself post
  2. Tag (either @hiveonboard or @hivepeople) in their first post so we can find their post and delegate some HP....'
    (We keep a list of all noobs who are in this new system, and reguarly check up on them to see what they are doing......and people who begin using Hive normally, then we take back the 15 HP delegation....)
    Once we do maybe a few campaigns using this onboarding site, and provide analytics, maybe submitting a proposal for Hive Power from the DAO might be an idea.....

The RC issue on new accounts is one of the most discussed points reading the comments here. I'll cover the whole topic in a new post in the next days.

First idea that goes into my mind:
I could provide you with a REST API endpoint where you could query newly created accounts and use this information to take steps further.

Will come back to this topic - I promise!

what about if the new user submits some kind of task, in the same way that Brave works: you have to slide the Brave icon onto the Triangle shape....this would cut down on automated sign ups....

Yep - stay tuned for it :)

cool, I think Brave system works beautifully.

BTW - did you noticed this here?
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ok cool.....thanks

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@stellabelle
Implemented an daily account creation report which will be posted a daily basis here:
https://peakd.com/@hiveonboard

Once we solved the abuse-rate expect to find a list of new user considered as noobs.

Hello, Stella. Is this service working now?
I have some new friends who could really use that 15HP.

Still me, Steemitri The Mannequin ;-)

I was checking the hiveonboard website.

Suggestion:
In case there aren't any accounts to claim, a user should have the opportunity to join in a different way.
Add something like Alternate registration methods (link to other dapps or HIVE.io).

Hugs

Steemitri The Mannequin

Thanks, this suggestion is a no brainer. Just implemented it.

Awesome work. I want to go through the entire process and give feedback and make sure all the grammar, etc is perfect....LOL. This was very fast work, and I am very excited to see this come to life. A campaign on Twitter is now possible with this site, and after the code is double checked by a dev, it looks like Go time. I think with this, your Brave ad proposal plus our marketing on Twitter, we could really create some traction.....good time are near for new user growth.

I'll throw a bit of HP your way, also when rc delegations are a thing I've got tons I never use, I've only every managed to get down to 99.8% so far and I consider myself pretty active.

Thank you very much!

This works really well :) Hope to provide some delegations :)

Wasn't on my scope yet -> Right now I would rather see hiveonboard as a portal to all those awesome services available right now. @rishi556 suggested https://giftgiver.sit if a user runs into ressource issues.

Not a perfect solution right now, but at a starting point :)

I would also suggest adding links where users can buy more hive without KYC - like binance or blocktrades.us

Cool idea, will do!

Binance has the most clout and looks the best for brand new users, imo.Plus, with Binance advertising on Brave, it kind of makes sense.....I think it's crucial that we show HIve as trustworthy esp. in the beginning when people are suspicious of anything new.

Adding a section how to acquire HIVE and HBD is on my todo list.
My first priority right now is to deal with those jerks who abuse the system and create spam accounts. Give me a day or two and we have a proper solution.

or stealthex.io (rates are somewhat decent)

Didn't know this one!

excellet idea!

Too late :P Hope you can claim some more accounts thanks to this.

Aye, once the RC delegations will be available we should see a nice boots in user creation :)

In order to stop people creating multiple accounts, the service will keep track of every ip address used for account creation and will throw an error message when somebody dares to abuse it.

You can buy over 10k sock5 proxy IPs for less than $10 for 3 days.

Yep lessons learned.
Since they are a few people who aren't interested in HIVE to succeed blocking IPs won't be enough. Any suggestions who aren't a paywall are much appreciated.

are these new hive accounts coming with free HP delegated? If so, then abuse is going to be rampant. thoughts?

No free HP delegated. I guess there a someone or a group of people who want to see HIVE or especially this project fail, which won't btw 😀

Email verification? Any sort of verification will make it just a bit harder, enough to deter some people.

You are close. Don't wanna disclose it right now, it'll be a nice surprise 👍

It will be ready in the next 2 days, a few more work has to be done.
Until then, I disabled account creation for now while we are stockpiling new account tickets.

Super cool! Maybe you could work together with @pharesim and hiveinvite.com?

Sure why not! Have to think about how those services could work hand in hand.

Steem Ninja or now, sting ninja or whatever its called now, is far superior product!

Great idea Christian @roomservice. As a new user still trying to figure out how things work, this project will make it easier. From a my point of view, it will be much easier to convince others to sign up without the paywall and with a simple process. People I know who are not necessarily bloggers / vloggers, but are only exploring the space might be convinced to stay and become active if they have a good experience with Hive. This will really help.

Good! Account creation has a bright future.

Next... "User Retention" otherwise the new users will just stop-by your free service and never come back to this platform again.

Complimenti!

This is awesome. 💪

Thanks for you support - much appreciated!

Sin duda alguna es un excelente proyecto y la posibilidad de recuperar en un primer momento lo invertido para crear la cuenta, ya crea un atractivo y confianza para las personas que no conocen esta tecnología y sus beneficios.

Gracias por los buenos comentarios!

This is a second idea of yours @roomservice in last few days that I stumbled upon and a second hit!...at least in my book:) Few days ago I remember praising your proposal in my article and few days later you’re back again with another masterpiece.

After all when a change in a code will be made, somewhere in the future, which would allow us to delegate RC instead of HP, the whole project would probably look more appealing. When that happens tho users will just switch their delegations and some changes will be made to the code/rules. Despite that I believe that you will attract some usable traction even using regular delegations (I personally will throw my few cents in too)!

Anyway I need to follow you right away! And I don’t press that button often:D

Its excellent!!! Congratulations for the good work.💪
Hug from Portugal

Stellar release! I love the overall design, it’s very aesthetically pleasing. Plus the functionality is on point you. I’ll be experimenting with using this when onboarding my acquaintances.

Only thing I can say is that you have PeakD spelled Peaked. Otherwise 👍👍
Thanks for this!

Thanks for your feedback! Just fixed the typo on PeakD.

If you have any further suggestions or ideas - let me know!

Clean and nice!
I love it and will like to see it implemented in more sites!

Good luck with the hackaton!

I stumbled across this post today and shortly after generating my referral link, my Daughter had an account in minutes. Seamless, no confusion... Perfect!

Thankyou! I remember watching my E-mail for days and days and days waiting for approval on that other platform! I think it took almost 2 weeks! 😎

It is really easy way to get hive accounts. I hope it will not be abused as it is awesome service for new users to get free accounts.

Congratulations @hiveonboard! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You received more than 10 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 50 upvotes.

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If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:

Hive Revolution - Call for missions
Vote for us as a witness to get one more badge and upvotes from us with more power!

Is there a way a user can donate their “account tickets”

It's a no brainer that these sorts of things have to be set up for making hive successful. And we still needd much more of this, thanks for your work!

You basically pointed out in your opening post how easy it is to abuse your service...
I just need to disconnect my router to have another IP adress (because no static IP). That's 1 account per minute...

I see this a bit like an experiment - let's see if someone will try to abuse it. Those created accounts have 0 hp so there's no benefit for abusing the service. Still, someone might be bored :D

Yep, the idea is to adept and solve problems when they happen.

Preventing abuse always comes with a price of a higher entry barrier. Already have some options on the table in case it will exploited.

I see the service is out of accounts already - I have some solutions tho :)

Would like to contact you - can I find you on discord?

Yes, about 90 accounts were claimed within 30 minutes.
Looking at the data, it looks like a single entity already abused the system.
No problem, we will adept -> that's the beauty in testing on a small scale.

Hit me on discord -> roomservice#8215

wow. brilliantly simple.
be happy to share this with new flks

This is what we need in this blockchain.
More big door to get more bees in.
2020 is the year to get the ship sailed high.
Kudos!

good project @hiveonboard
good luck for all

Awesome work, keep it up.

Brilliant! I think this is exactly what we needed! I'll be testing this all out and then we can start a campaign....very soon! Thanks for doing all this work...after someone checks out the Github, we will be ready to rock and roll. Thank you!

Just one remaining question: has anyone check the code on Github?

The most interesting part would be:
How are password and keys handled?

In case a user clicks on "Create Account" a https endpoint is called which will trigger this cloud function:
https://github.com/christianfuerst/hiveonboard/blob/c52861b19df937a68bfd44c3cd62e6927a0ebf16/functions/index.js#L19

You can review the cloud function from there. The password and keys are generated on a secure google cloud server and send back to the client with https encryption.

Right now the following information are stored in the backend (Link):

  • Account Name
  • IP Address
  • Timestamp
  • Voted (did the account receive his "welcome" vote")

Since there isn't a technical path (that I know) where discounted accounts can be created without an on-chain transaction from the account creator, there has to be a minimum level of trust.

I'am free for further reviews or audits.

thanks for the thorough answer.

Amazing !!! This is a huge step forward, to which HIVE users came already in the 2nd month of existence !!!

Since I didn't have any idle SP for delegation, all I can do now is to inform others. With my current following, re-posting doesn't help too but still give it a chance. Thank you for the initiative @hiveonboard.

There have been numerous occassions that I've seen the previous onboarding / account creation processes result in reputible crypto-community members abandoning interest in joining the platform. Thank you for creating this. I have my HP mostly delegated through dlease, if there is a way to provide account creation assistance another way, please let me know.

Thank you for building @hiveonboard!

I wanted to create an account first, then I wan to give it to someone. It is like rewarding someone. But since IP address in under survillance, I thing I better not do this.
This is what I notice, when I share hive.blog, when there is fee, those people I recommend they just do not continue. I like to help hive community as much as I can.

Your system looks the friendliest I've seen so far: as to saving the keys I would love to see some kind of integration with Keychain, Hivewallet and other systems.

Outside Hive it would be great if there was a way to get keys into 1Password and LastPass and whatever else are the leading password managers. I must admit 1Password is where I store all my keys. I have to go through a tedious manual process of pasting all the keys into a window. I know the master password is all I need but it's useful to have the other keys easily on hand.

Great idea!
I see all tickets are gone, mmmh kind of weird... Is there a way to track those accounts?
Just to know if they are spam or not.

Yep, service will be back after a few adjustments.
I'll report on detail first learnings later today.

Since then you can track those accounts here on "Create Claimed Account":
https://beeme.icu/?account=roomservice

Oh right... just checked ;-)
This post is on trending, so today is kind of normal to ran out of accounts. I think HIVE users claimed some accounts, but who knows. Let's wait and see what happens in the next days.
Anyway... Great product and project!

Where can we post bugs? I found out the profile update crashes. Please see this post: https://hive.blog/bug/@happycoda/bug-update-profile-settings-is-not-working

You give such a wonderful service to hive community

Free onboarding is important. I notice that 3Speak seems to be the promoted video platform around here. Has 3Speak become free? I moved my video uploads to other platforms several months ago, in part because 3Speak wasn't free at the time.

Thanks a lot, i just signed up using this method and it's pretty easy and straight forward. Unfortunately the signin up process in hive is not user friendly and it should change in the future.

Thank you very very very much, this sorted one of my main problems, I want to reward my website visitors with cryptocurrency that I will create on Hive Engine, but for my visitors to be able to use it, they need a hive account, so this makes my day! since is free is good for Hive and for everyone who wants to join the hive ecosystem, amazingly good for advertising also!
Thank you to all involved!

Let's keep spreading the word right :)

my first time seeing a post make 200 wit me own eyes

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😳 😳 😳

I can't refer my friend and he cannot signup or me trying to use hive onboard or the hive.io link it shows the message is as follows for both of us:

Service Unvailable
We are currently out of account creation tickets. Check back later or use signup.hive.io for other account creation options.

Nice development to have a cost-free sign up for the #hive ecosystem. It can be daunting for a newcomer. Nice things are evolving at a good pace.

I'm sure early adopters will be handsomely rewarded.

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Great news! Account crestion was always a bit weird because of the unusual steps with keys and stuff. Everything that makes it more user friendly is a good step.