Suggestions for validation of app.co submission form

Currently, the ‘Submit your Dapp’ form does zero validation, at all. The benefit of this is that its super easy for anyone, including people who didn’t make the app, to submit your dapp. The downside is that we lose valuable information, or we get incomplete information about an app.

In short, my proposal is:

Required:

  • Name
  • Description
  • Website
  • Logo URL
  • Category

Not Required:

  • Contact email
  • Open Source URL
  • Twitter Handle
  • Blockchain
  • Storage Network
  • Authentication

We’ve found that the ‘contact email’ is very important for doing sales related to app mining, and thus making it required would help there. However, less than 5% of app submissions include any contact email, indicating one of two things:

  • The app is submitted by a non-employee
  • The app submitter is an employee, but doesn’t see any reason to add a contact email, and worries about spam

I don’t think we should make the contact email field required, because that would block third-party submissions, which are valuable for filling out our database. We could add a note under that field to indicate the benefit of providing a contact email. This would definitely be good to do whenever we go public about App Mining, and have some documentation.

Category should definitely be required, but we should also do some research about improving our categories to be more accurate. For example, the ‘financial services’ category currently covers everything from prediction markets to lending to investing apps.

The blockchain, authentication, and storage fields should not be required. There are many valid dapps that have blank values for these fields.

I think that Logo URL should be required.

Twitter handle and open source URL should not be required, because they can be validly blank.

Name, description, and website should be required.

I agree with this proposal in general.

Category should definitely be required, but we should also do some research about improving our categories to be more accurate.

I’m not sure I see the need to require this? I think the general principle should be that we require only fields that we truly need to be provided, not that we simply really want to be provided.

If we don’t have a category for an app – perhaps because it doesn’t fit well into any of the ones we list – then the app can be discoverable on the site regardless, at least through search.

All the other required fields you list seem truly required because without them, the display of an app will look quite funky at the very least.