FAQ
What is Dear Stranger?
Dear Stranger is about letting people send anonymized letters to also be answered anonymously by anyone in the world! You can use it to share an idea, tell a joke, confess secrets, or really whatever it is you want to say.
As long as it's not offensive, anything goes!
Why was it made?
Simply put, I made this app because I wanted to get into web development. I came up with the idea of Dear Stranger after I realized that there aren't many places you can say dump some words and get a response about it with full anonymity between you and the reader. Thus, Dear Stranger was born.
How to use it?
Just create an account and start writing letters or respond to letters. Simple as that!
You may select a country to let those who read your letters / responses to know where the letter is written from!
When your letter recieves a response, you will recieve an email to let you know.
How was it built?
The web app is hosted on Vercel and is built with NextJS, a React framework. It uses PandaCSS as the CSS component framework.
For the backend, it uses the Prisma to connect and send requests to a Supabase DB instance.
It also uses NextAuth to handle User Authentication and nodemailer to send emails.
Who can read my letters?
Within the website, only you and the user randomly assigned to answer your letter can read your letters.
I, as the sole developer of the website, can also access and read your letters by accessing the database, but only for the purposes stated in the privacy policy. (Basically, nothing malicious)
How are letters assigned?
As soon as a user chooses to respond to a random letter, the server will randomly select a letter from a pool of letters that haven't been answered and show it to the user. If the user hasn't responded within 1 hour, the letter gets sent back to the pool to be randomly selected again.
Users are limited by how often they can answer letters to 5 letters per hour. (So one person can't spam responses, hope you understand)
Credits
Sean Michael - Creator
Amirul Azizol - View Letters Page
Shariq Nadeem - Minor tweaks
Legal information