I used to make a social media site similar to Facebook when I was learning PHP and MySQL. I took the platform pretty far, but it was never successful. In this article, I will tell you in detail why it was not successful in case someone else can learn from my mistake.
The beginnings
I read an article that Facebook was also made in PHP, and since I was learning the PHP language and the MySQL database at the time, it inspired me. Since I didn’t know how to start, I watched a couple of YouTube videos and then tried to put it all together from scratch. My idea was to make a community platform just for developers.
I was dumb in development
When I started the whole thing, all I knew was that I could connect to the database in PHP and I could color the background of a text in HTML. I didn’t know too much.
As you can guess, the whole look was a fraction, without any padding and I also copied the login function from a tutorial. As a result, it was only possible to login in a phplogin folder because I was so stupid that I couldn’t transfer everything to the root folder of the web server. I didn’t solve the likes and everything else with Ajax, but redirected the user to another PHP page. And on that page I connected to the database. Well, you can imagine that it was vulnerable to all kinds of SQL injection 😅… Unfortunately I can’t show you a screenshot of it, but here is its logo. I think it says a lot that I couldn’t even put together a normal logo at that time.
The "big” redesign
This project was very good for me from a learning point of view, because while I added functions that were worse than bad, my knowledge improved. After about 1 year, I realized that what I was doing was not good for anything. I had to think it all over again. I used Bootstrap to create the look, which, let’s face it, was not the best solution in the long run. But I will write about that later in this article. I realized that PProg is a stupid name, so I gave it an even more idiotic name: Followrel (Follow — to follow people and rel meant relatives) Here’s how the platform looked after the big redesign:
So as you can see, the hype around the platform was bigger than the platform itself. I even made some social accounts to promote my social media platform. I gave the account the name Compputy later when I already had other projects, and eventually it was also discontinued.
The Followrel chat
I didn’t really care that the existing functions were bad as they are, but you could chat within the platform!
More idiotic feature
Fun facts. None of them ever worked in life. I made a Followrel coin feature that could be earned by following, posting, liking or completing the profile. I even made a premium subscription system, although there were only a few users and they were either me or my friends. You can guess who would have bought it. The company pages function was also subject to the subscription. I also made a report content feature but it never worked. Let’s not even talk about the comment section under the posts!
As you can see, the design was still a piece of [__].
Here is what a company Followrel page looked like. I would do now better with my eyes closed now. Well, I was about 13-14 years old then.
The new logo, advertisements
After a few years, I felt that Followrel didn’t need a logo with the letter P. I made one back then, but it was very checkered. When I got better at design, I made a better logo and more professional advertisements. Now let’s see the cringe gallery again!
I have announced a search function too, but the image is so blurry that it would destroy this article’s overall performance.
The death of the platform
A period began when the number of users increased enormously. There were about 120 such users. This was all well and good until the attackers discovered the existence of my page. I didn’t check the input fields, so the platform had to survive countless XSS, SQL injection and DDoS attacks. Back then, my experience was more serious, and I was able to fix these vulnerabilities. However, this did not cause the death of the platform!
I was thinking about monetizing the platform with ads. Since Google Adsense and no other famous advertising service provider accepted my site for understandable reasons, I found Adsterra. The only thing worth knowing about Adsterra is that it is full of malvertising and scam ads. Stupid me, I flooded my page with these. And the users' antivirus blocked my entire site. I lost quite a few users here.
The reason I buried the platform
On the one hand, because I couldn’t see and improve my own code, I just threw in all the functions. The other was that there was no user and was not worth fighting for. No one specifically posted. Thirdly, I always wanted to switch between dark and light themes and a notification function, but I messed it up and there was no reset point. So I kept it for a while and then I buried it all. I couldn’t change the design because of bootstrap.
Lessons learned
- Start coding with easier projects. You can’t build the next Facebook
- Your first projects serve your learning and are not marketable. Do not trust any input!
- Quality is more important than quantity
- It’s a good thing to build a project from the ground up. You learn more than watching tutorials
As a professional PHP developer, it’s very cringe to look back on the old days like this, but I hope I could help you! Please consider following me for more about programing, and clap if you liked it! You can also comment your opinion!
