Bare Naked App

… well, that was the plan, however so far we’d been down the route that users would use an email address and a password to login, I hear you asking how this affects URLs. Well, if we’re identifying users by an email address then it makes sense that their “rating page” could be accessed by a nice URL that looked similar to their email address. There’s the problem:

An email address, public, on the web = spam

Okay, so it wouldn’t quite be an email address, but for someone with the know-how it wouldn’t take much to get that information. Apart from not wanting to annoy the users of Amigo with more spam, given the nature of the service, spam is the last thing we’d want to be associated with!

Pretty URLs were the plan, so pretty URLs there will be, something had to change. The simple solution here was to have something else to identify users by, i.e. a username.