Having your home page be just a login button is a bit disappointing.
There's no screenshots and no information about how it works (or information at all for that matter), which doesn't really convince me to create an account (in my mind, the process of picking a deck and printing it is not one where requiring a login would be obvious, so some more "convincing" might help).
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I'd guess many people would similarly refrain from creating an account for the reasons mentioned above.
Edit: Turns out there's a cool scrolling cards animation as background! It's just that it doesn't seem to work on Firefox so there it just has a blank background.
I agree. Without this post, if I visited the page without any prior knowledge, I'd have no idea what this is about, and would have no incentive to sign up.
Maybe some sort of "guest mode" where you could use the site, pick a deck and preview the printing (maybe a very small image), but then required an account to not lose the deck or actually getting the printable would be pretty reasonable.
That said, maybe there's some other advantage to having an account that I just didn't think of.
If you want to play around with it, try account hn@example.com with password hackernews!
I didn't add any restrictions on email registration because I hear you that actually creating an account can be a chore. Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary, which is why I rarely do it.
but also the chat function doesn't do anything unless you supply an email. Seriously without your post text here it's literally impossible to figure out what your site does exactly pre-account creation
> I didn't add any restrictions on email registration […] Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary
Aren’t you still effectively doing that, though?
This seems like the combination of two downsides: Bots will be able to perform email verification if they want to; honest users will still be deterred.
The animated background works in Chrome, but not Firefox. There is one CSS rule that Firefox doesn't like. If you open the Firefox devtools/console and type this, it'll fix it:
There's no screenshots and no information about how it works (or information at all for that matter), which doesn't really convince me to create an account (in my mind, the process of picking a deck and printing it is not one where requiring a login would be obvious, so some more "convincing" might help).
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I'd guess many people would similarly refrain from creating an account for the reasons mentioned above.
Edit: Turns out there's a cool scrolling cards animation as background! It's just that it doesn't seem to work on Firefox so there it just has a blank background.