santah

Hey HN. I was always a huge fan of Reddit's RemindMe! bot and wanted to have something like that outside of Reddit, so I finally built it!

You can try it here: https://mailreminder.net/

I looked around before I started making it myself - there are a few such services, but:

1) none is as intuitive and simple as I need it to be 2) I can't trust any of them to deliver my reminders far away into the future (for example - after 1 year)

As a solo developer, I have the track record of my main service (you can find it in my post history) being online now for more than 20 years (and I have others running 17+ years) so I know this email reminder will be something I can rely on. You can too.

I tried to make it as simple and straightforward as possible so it's always quick and convenient to use. No account needed, easy magic email login if you want to see pending/sent reminders.

As I'm sure you're curious (as I always am) about AI use - I used (heavily) Claude Opus 4.6 to build it (I didn't use it to write or improve this post, I don't do that!). UI and UX wise, it's 90% me - 10% Claude, code wise - it's about the opposite - 80-90% of the code was done by Claude, though I provided guidance and steered toward simplicity throughout. It uses no frameworks or external libraries. I don't use Claude Code - just claude.ai on a $20 sub, but my workflow is fairly context frugal so I never ran into limits. If anyone is curious about it - I'll share the details of how I use Claude in the comments.

I don't plan on monetizing it any time soon (if ever). Like all my other projects - I created this to address a personal pain point and I hope it'll be useful to others. If by any chance it grows in popularity (which I doubt, because it's such a niche tool) - I can see it being monetized (mostly to offset email sending charges) through sponsors in the footer of the reminder email or something like that.

This is the first time I'm sharing this service outside of a small circle of friends so I have no idea what kind of feedback and/or suggestions I'll get, but as I'm writing this - I don't plan to add any more features other than maybe an "about" or a "faq" section where I explain some of what I wrote here (like why should one trust that this random free website will still work in a year to deliver their email reminder) and maybe a dark theme?

Thank you for reading through all that and hopefully for trying this tool. All comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated and I'm around if you have any questions!

Cheers

I run https://next-episode.net and recently (a few months ago) - I noticed it started getting pages not indexed because of “Server error (5xx)” in Google Search Console (GSC):

https://next-episode.net/img/upload/5xx.png

On the website everything looked good and all reported links worked fine.

I tried validating these errors at GSC as fixed, but it would always report back that the issue is still present and new links would keep popping up to have 5xx errors (as seen on the screenshot).

This was worrisome because it indicated there was some kind of an issue I wasn’t aware of that may be affecting not only Google’s crawlers, but my users as well.

I did what everyone would do - checked my server, Cloudflare and analytics logs for anything suspicious and placed some additional logging to try and catch what was happening.

This turned out nothing - as far as I could tell - no requests returned any 5xx errors, so I decided it’s just a weird Google quirk and ignored it for a while.

With time though, Google kept reporting these problems and the count of 5xx URLs only grew larger so once again (about 2 weeks ago) I started investigating what was happening.

This time around, I tried to match the URLs reported by GSC with the analytics provided by Cloudflare and bingo - I found that all these requests had the Edge Status Code (and Origin Status Code) of “429 Too Many Requests”.

Now that was progress.

There is only one thing on my service that would return this status code and is my custom rate limiting which would be triggered if you do more than 30 requests in less than 10 seconds.

What changed so that Google suddenly decided to crawl so aggressively and hit that limit (something that never happened before, and Next Episode is online for more than 19 years now!) and why it’s reporting them 5xx in GSC when my server clearly returns 429 - I don’t know.

What I do know for sure is that Google is misreporting 429 server status as 5xx.

To fix this (at least as a quick fix for now) - I whitelisted in my rate limiter all Google Crawlers’ IPs (which I found through here: https://www.infidigit.com/blog/google-update-googlebots-ip-a... ) - listed in this JSON provided by Google: https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot...

For just in case, I also passed on the ASN in the request header (through a Cloudflare transform rule) and whitelisted the whole Google ASN (15169) as well.

After - I monitored for new 5xx errors popping up in GSC and new 429 statuses logged in Cloudflare from Google’s ASN and so far (for more than 2 weeks) - so good.

On my service - https://next-episode.net - along with signing in with username and password, there is an option to sign in with Google and Facebook.

3 days ago, I get this email from Facebook "Complete business verification for Next Episode" which notifies me that my Facebook app (which handles the Facebook login functionality) now needs to be connected to a verified business account.

This is where they announced this back in February: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2023/02/01/develop...

Now, going through the steps of filling out my name, address, phone number etc, I checked the "How we use your information" link and in it, it said "In certain cases, we'll update your publicly available Page Transparency information with some of the details you confirm during verification".

In the Page Transparency information page: https://www.facebook.com/help/323314944866264/ it says the information about the owner may include "The Confirmed Page Owner's verified legal name and registered city, country and/or phone number". Later on, on the same page, they say you can remove (or request to remove) some of the information visible there, but they never specify which information you'll be able to remove.

Anyone with an experience with this? I don't want my address and/or phone number publicly visible, so what are my options here?

For now, I have removed the option to sign up with Facebook (existing users can still use it to sign in) and I plan to completely remove it (by the time the December 11th deadline comes around) notifying users about the change upfront and giving them the option to switch to Sign in with Google or with username and password.