Pacimosity

Inspiration

Hack Harassment

What it does

Pacimosity strives to pacify a user's animosity and negative emotions by scanning a webpage for potentially offensive words and gives the user a rating of how toxic that page is. At high levels of toxicity, we send notifications to the user with suggestions to help keep them calm and focused on the better parts of life. Our server communicates with a database to pull a list of words and then stores the URL and its rating on the server. We also added a table to our database that stores the ratings of URLs in order to build a data set that shows which websites tend to be more toxic.

How I built it

We built each piece separately, focusing on the core functionality of each before integrating them and ensuring they communicated properly.

Challenges I ran into

We initially tried to host everything on AWS, which ended up being a much more complex and difficult task that anticipated. We ended up running everything through localhost. None of us had ever done a Chrome extension before so we had to pick it up on the fly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Building a Chrome extension with no prior experience developing for Chrome

What I learned

Start web development locally and then deploy to a server when the app is finished.

What's next for Pacimosity

Improving the Chrome extension to look nicer and behave more smoothly. Using the table of URL ratings to provide more intelligent feedback. Looking for patterns in the users habits (i.e., seeing if they're continually visiting pages with high indexes) to try and prevent someone who's upset from lashing out online.