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This was really fun, and instantly brought me back to my island. The share message function is also super cute, but looking at the code, all the bottle messages seem to be preprogrammed in bottles.json?

I guess moderation would be a nightmare. Are the bottle messages actually stored or sent anywhere?

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I'm so glad you enjoyed it! And yes the messages are sent to me, no worries. Submitted messages are sent to an AWS API Gateway endpoint for rate limiting and then to me. I then manually commit the ones that are not rude and don't include identifying info/don't seem to have been submitted by mistake! I have a couple of reasons for manually committing them rather than using a simple DynamoDB database or something. First, since I have to moderate through the messages manually anyways, it's about the same amount of effort tbh. Second, I wanted the messages to be available forever and having them committed allows for people to save them in the future should they wish to!

The messages are suspiciously wholesome, I don’t think they are from other users at all.

Yeah all the messages you get are preprogrammed from a bottles.json file. At first I was pleasantly surprised at how wholesome the messages were..

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