Jakkass - Free International Texts!

Timmins

Over the last week or so i set up a website called Jakkass for its users to send free international SMS messages through. I thought it'd be a useful tool for people like myself once their credit and webtexts run out. No signup is neccesary, you just visit the site, enter a number and a message and the message will be send instantly.

Special thanks go out to donut for his AFT service, which this website is based on. Also to yman for general help around the site.

Since the site's texts are international, they're run on o2 simcards / web login details, and each SIM costs 15 euro if bought in a shop. I would be greatly appreciative if those of you who have webtexts to spare would like to donate them to the service - i'll add your names to the "About" page if anyone feels as generous!

Anyway, the URL as follows, thanks for reading!

http://www.jakkass.com

donutface

Good job Timmins, excellent design, I wish the aft site would look at cool

Btw ill offer free ASP.net webspace for any AFT related projects for people that are interested.

A good idea would be a place where people would put in their phone numbers to a no send list to prevent harrassment

Otherwise keep up the good work

Maybe if this stays alive long enough thhen AFT can have a send anonymous text button

Timmins

Thanks for the suggestion donut, the harrassment prevention sounds a good idea alright. I've just finished writing it there, and it can be read about on the "Help" page. As for the "send anonymous" function on AFT, it sounds great, pity the java application does'nt work on my phone though.

Random

Timmins wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion donut, the harrassment prevention sounds a good idea alright. I've just finished writing it there, and it can be read about on the "Help" page. As for the "send anonymous" function on AFT, it sounds great, pity the java application does'nt work on my phone though.

Looks like a great idea

andy0

Looks a great idea

I'm slightly worried you'll eventually be discovered and abused by manic Italians sending hundreds to themselves to top up their SIM cards; this happened when Voipbuster brought out their "unlimited" offer (actually 250 a month to one's own country)

Viewing the Jakkass home page as a wap/gprs bookmark, the text entry boxes don't line up and a bit of scrolling around the screen is required (and I have images turned off)

But it works for sending - seems to use between 5 and 8k of data

Are there chances to later customise a page for this use?

wba88

good idea hope it goes well for u

donutface

andy0 wrote:

Looks a great idea

I'm slightly worried you'll eventually be discovered and abused by manic Italians sending hundreds to themselves to top up their SIM cards; this happened when Voipbuster brought out their "unlimited" offer (actually 250 a month to one's own country)

Viewing the Jakkass home page as a wap/gprs bookmark, the text entry boxes don't line up and a bit of scrolling around the screen is required (and I have images turned off)

But it works for sending - seems to use between 5 and 8k of data

Are there chances to later customise a page for this use?

Can you please tell me how that top up thing works?
Easy solution to it - ban italy

andy0

donutface wrote:

Can you please tell me how that top up thing works?
Easy solution to it - ban italy

There are prepaid SIM cards in a few countries that earn a small amount of credit for incoming calls and text messages, in what some people might view as exploitation of uneven termination charges.

3 UK introduced this about a year ago, 5p/min for incoming calls and 2p per message, but they had learned from previous mistakes and the WePay credit is only added to equal the value of the next cash top-up, and has a finite life.

Some of the early Italian versions of such schemes could earn credit that was unlifed. There are rumoured to be SIMs with over €1000 on that have never had actual cash put on.

So you could be right about barring them later

drdre

Sounds like a great idea thanks

Sam Vimes

remember that o2 lets you keep sending texts when your free ones run out but charge you.

if someone automated access to it and left it for a few hours they could send hundreds of texts to someone anonymously and blame it on you you and when the free texts run out on the accounts he could use up all your credit. something to think about

both of these problems are avoided by never topping up the accounts and by not registering them

donutface

yeah once it reaches less than 5 messages, the site refuses to send

Terrontress

Hi Timmins,

Just a word to say thanks for your service. A big proportion of my 3 bill is UK texts, which cost €0.25 per time. I can't help with the O2 bit but have an idea.

What if you were to provide a premium service for €10 per year or so where you have to log in and then the recipient is able to reply to the sender.

I would definitely be prepared to pay for that service.

Sam Vimes

I wouldnt think thats possible. The service uses o2 webtexts that can be sent abroad, which is why the text appears to come from that number. 3 doesnt have any webtexts, let alone ones that can be sent abroad so it cant be made to come from a 3 number.


The closest would be to put a "from" text box. The number would be sent as part of the text. Some phones can find and highlight phone numbers in texts and give the option to text them

Terrontress

Might be a good idea although it would cut down on the number of characters which can be sent.

On Opera on my 6280, the last number sent stays when you reload jakkass so you wouldn't have to keep filling in your number again and again.

There could be a line "Sent from: +353831234567"

Timmins

andy0, sounds like a great idea, and not hard to write at all. I'll get to work on it when time is more on my side, thanks for the suggestion!

Commander Vimes, thats all been taken care of. If the message remaining count on o2 accounts goes down to 5 they're taken off the list of active logins and aren't used for sending messages until next month.

Tetroness, your idea is not the easiest thing to go about doing - attaching webtexts to a certain number is something i don't know much about and would probably require direct contact with the service providers. We could of course provide accounts especially for each user at the price of a SIM, and the messages would be sent from that same number always. Jakkass stores last destination number in a cookie and reloads it when you visit the site, if within an hour of the last message sent. This is handy for times when you're having a conversation with someone via SMS.

Do you mean a line "Sent from: " on the message sent confirmation page, or included in the message? Doesn't sound like a bad idea for the confirmation page, i'll add it to the todo list - many thanks!

Sam Vimes

Timmins wrote:

Do you mean a line "Sent from: " on the message sent confirmation page, or included in the message? Doesn't sound like a bad idea for the confirmation page, i'll add it to the todo list - many thanks!

he meant to put it in the message. as he says it'll cut down on the number of characters sent but the person knows who it came from and can highlight the number to reply to it. its the only way i can thjink of to implement a way of quickly replying to the texts. i'd just create a new message myself

dal

Terrontress wrote:

Hi Timmins,

Just a word to say thanks for your service. A big proportion of my 3 bill is UK texts, which cost €0.25 per time. I can't help with the O2 bit but have an idea.

What if you were to provide a premium service for €10 per year or so where you have to log in and then the recipient is able to reply to the sender.

I would definitely be prepared to pay for that service.

You might be interested in smsdiscount. I use it myself. Its 1c per message to most popular destinations (uk and ireland included) and the message actually appears to the recipient as if it has come from your number. There is a desktop application for it and a web interface. AFT (the java app for your phone) supports smsdiscount (not yet the "from number" part, but should be ready soon).

Btw, brilliant work Timmins. Always great to see someone spreading the free love

flodis79

Thanks for a very nice project!

I have spotted one bug: sometimes it says "message sent" but there is an error message in the url, eg "can't connect" and the message is not sent.. Check it up

donutface

how about displaying how many messages has been sent with it :P

Timmins

Added the "messages sent to date:" feature there. Also updated the number blocking system.

Floodis, i've seen this bug before aswell, i'll have to write some code to recognise the errors that AFT returns, and handle them appropriately. Thanks for pointing this out!

andy0

Timmins wrote:

andy0, sounds like a great idea, and not hard to write at all. I'll get to work on it when time is more on my side, thanks for the suggestion!

Well, I don't know much about html, but looking at the source code of the page, I'd imagine that you could remove a fair chunk and might get a wap version under 1k

As for other people's remarks about number, surely they can themselves insert this or their name in the message body, and it isn't for you to worry about, especially as I can't see how you could verify their number

Timmins

If i was to add a WAP feature, i would add a seperate page, jakkass.com/wap.htm or something and exclude images. Not very high on my list of priorities at the moment, but i'll definitely keep it in mind.

Sam Vimes

andy0 wrote:

As for other people's remarks about number, surely they can themselves insert this or their name in the message body, and it isn't for you to worry about, especially as I can't see how you could verify their number

they can add it themselves and there's no way to verify it. someone asked for the feature and that's the only way i could think of to implement it but its not really necessary tbh

M450

You guys are such legends!!

I set up my aft account and all that and set up the application on my phone, but just hav to ring meteor to change my internet settings and all that!!

Its a really brilliant idea, i spotted the desktop application to send messages and thought that was really useful, but then noticed the phone application... brilliant.
Im studying computer science myself in college, jus finished 2nd yr.. i find this stuff really interesting.

So im going interrailing this summer and this seems like a great way to dodge roaming charges for sms... altho i suppose there's roaming charges for downloading using isp also. Will it work?

Sam Vimes

M450 wrote:

So im going interrailing this summer and this seems like a great way to dodge roaming charges for sms... altho i suppose there's roaming charges for downloading using isp also. Will it work?

i used it in prague on meteor and it didn't cost any more

Terrontress

dal wrote:

You might be interested in smsdiscount. I use it myself. Its 1c per message to most popular destinations (uk and ireland included) and the message actually appears to the recipient as if it has come from your number. There is a desktop application for it and a web interface. AFT (the java app for your phone) supports smsdiscount (not yet the "from number" part, but should be ready soon).

Btw, brilliant work Timmins. Always great to see someone spreading the free love

Looks good Dal. It seems to be half way what I want to use whereas jakkass is the other half.

What I want is either a java app for my phone or else a web based app that I can use on Opera mini to send web texts internationally for either free or else a fraction of the 3 mobile cost.

I will maybe download AFT and take a look. As I don't have O2, M or V, I thought I wouldn't neet it.

dal

Terrontress wrote:

Looks good Dal. It seems to be half way what I want to use whereas jakkass is the other half.

What I want is either a java app for my phone or else a web based app that I can use on Opera mini to send web texts internationally for either free or else a fraction of the 3 mobile cost.

I will maybe download AFT and take a look. As I don't have O2, M or V, I thought I wouldn't neet it.

I use AFT with smsdiscount. Smsdiscount charge 1c per message. Its would definitely be a lot quicker than opening opera and then loading a web page and possibly cheaper (tho I don't know what the charges are like for 3).

Terrontress

dal wrote:

I use AFT with smsdiscount. Smsdiscount charge 1c per message. Its would definitely be a lot quicker than opening opera and then loading a web page and possibly cheaper (tho I don't know what the charges are like for 3).

I've downloaded AFT but am in work so will have to register for smsdiscount at home tonight as it is firewalled on our works computers.

Will the text messages I send through AFT have my number as the sender?

Thanks,

dal

Terrontress wrote:

I've downloaded AFT but am in work so will have to register for smsdiscount at home tonight as it is firewalled on our works computers.

Will the text messages I send through AFT have my number as the sender?

Thanks,

Thats what I am working on right now. I have changed the AFT client to allow a "from number" as well as multiple saved accounts. I am testing this over the weekend and will hopefully have a release on monday.
The current version of AFT does actually support smsdiscount but the sender will appear as your username.

If you have any more questions, stick them on the AFT thread as I don't want to clog up Timmins' thread.

Terrontress

dal wrote:

Thats what I am working on right now. I have changed the AFT client to allow a "from number" as well as multiple saved accounts. I am testing this over the weekend and will hopefully have a release on monday.
The current version of AFT does actually support smsdiscount but the sender will appear as your username.

If you have any more questions, stick them on the AFT thread as I don't want to clog up Timmins' thread.

Yeah, sorry about that. Either way, both of them are fantastic and will have a great effect on my monthly bill.

Timmins

I wonder how long it will take the operators in ireland to realise that their services are being milked for all theire worth, and restrict them to 30messages per month like in the UK. Hopefully not soon, as there is a great platform for expandability there.

ct5amr2ig1nfhp

timmins, I was only thinking about this today. It would be a shame if they reduce the number of webtexts per month or worse, got rid of them completely.

Until then...keep up the good work

Timmins

Well after about 3 days of activity theres been almost 3000 views on the page, a figure i'm fairly happy with. The details page you see after you send a message also tells me that 634 messages have been sent to date, with over 200 being sent in the last 24 hours!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to getting the site moving along a bit more, and gaining more traffic and exposure?

Thanks for your support,

t1mm

donutface

at that rate your going to need about 20 webtext accounts, and thats not even factoring any growth. I hope you have some way of getting simcards cheaply/free!

Timmins

Your predictions were right, both the o2 accounts from which international messages are sent were renewed with 250 texts (500 in total) on the 1st, and now (on the 3rd) theres barely 100 left. I can use my own account if needs be, and i'll be getting another o2 account tonight to add to the list. Donut was correct again - its appealing to international customers more so than irish ones!

Random

I would suggest not using your own account.

donutface

the irish people have their own 300 webtexts either, plus theres 4 million people living in Ireland vs how many people outisde of Irelad that have motive to send text messages

andy0

I think that's right; after all when sat at a computer, any Irish O2 subscriber could just as well log in to their own account. And other Irish network subscribers can use their own account for Ireland and just use this for international, where they couldn't use AFT either. And with some users from abroad as well, you're bound to see almost all international destinations.

As for getting more traffic and exposure, I wonder if it's a bit early if you're at capacity this quickly and need more SIMs already. This could get quite big, especially with a wap version and if it becomes known internationally.

Random

I agree with the point about traffic ... you can't handle it as it is, so maybe relax a bit.

Also, maybe get some of the free Meteor SIMs and use them for SMS to Irish numbers - no cost to you!

Timmins

I discovered earlier on that Meteor SIMs are no longer free - you have to buy at least 10euro meteor credit to obtain one, and going to the bother of selling the credit to someone to make it free isn't worth the hassle.

The point was brought up at the MSN table today that outsourcing of sms email gateways could be used to send messages to numbers on particular networks to their respective company's gateway service instead of through our webtexts. Volounteers from around the world will be neccesary though.

Thats where IRC will come into the equation.

philologos

Sounds an awful lot like spamming to me. But good luck with the site anyway.

Timmins

What sounds like spamming?

philologos

Posting a thread to promote your own website, sounds like spamming to me.

flodis79

@Timmins: Do you have an automatic routine that sends all the irish texts thru voda or meteor accounts so that the o2 texts are not wasted on irish texts?

Timmins

Jakkass - if this is "spamming", then you might say the same about AFT and Dorsh. The word you're looking for is "plugging".

Floodis, yeah only international webtexts are sent through the o2 accounts.

philologos

regardless theres a section on adverts.ie for services offered.

donutface

the difference is that this is completely on topic, and timmins isnt selling a service (the profit he makes from advertising is dismal)

Its spamming if its off topic, if he goes and advertises his Lego related blog or some bull**** like that, I fully agree, however what he posted can benefit anyone on the forum, which is the same with AFT.

With your logic we might aswell not even have a forum, because that new nokia phone or that new service that came out by meteor, yup its advertising/spamming. What difference is it if you talk about your own service, or if you talk about others?


Plus have a read on the service charter on adverts.ie

3, Ads containing links to websites pertaining to your services are deemed commercial and will be removed.

So posting it there isnt an option, theres nothing like that here afaik

philologos

If he isn't selling a service, it won't be deemed commercial surely.

Charter wrote:

No blatant advertising/soliciting (unless you pay Boards Ltd. for it).

Pythia

I don't think there's any spamming going on, maybe promotion. But since it's a free service, it can only be good imo.

Random

Pythia wrote:

I don't think there's any spamming going on, maybe promotion. But since it's a free service, it can only be good imo.

here here!

andy0

I get told that the message has been sent; but it doesn't arrive

Have all the available messages been used up for now?