Glassbox
Anonymous student feedback platform — courses and professors, with no account required.
Why
My girlfriend had a bad experience with a professor. She knew that challenging it formally would only put her grades at risk — and that no matter what they say, when it’s a student’s word against a professor’s, the professor wins. These cases get buried.
The information asymmetry is structural. Students pick courses blind. If fifteen people have the same problem with the same professor, nobody knows, because each of them thinks they’re the only one. Official end-of-year surveys exist, but everyone knows they go nowhere.
Glassbox is a public, anonymous board where students at my university share what courses are actually like. Not a complaint wall — useful information so others can make better decisions.
Anonymity isn’t a promise here, it’s a technical limitation. Emails are deleted from memory the moment they’re verified — they never touch the database. No IPs are logged. The token that lets you post isn’t linked to your email anywhere. Even if someone forced us to reveal who posted what, we couldn’t. The data doesn’t exist.
I knew nobody would use it without that guarantee. The community is small for now, but the architecture is the point.
What it does
- Lets students post anonymous reviews of courses and professors, broken down by metrics (clarity, fairness, workload, difficulty, materials, accessibility) plus a free-text experience field
- Verifies users as real students via institutional email; the email is deleted from memory the moment verification completes and never touches the database
- Ranks courses with aggregate scores so patterns become visible across many reviews — the point most missed when each student thinks they’re alone
- Holds back posts written in a flagged emotional state with a cooldown period, prompting the author to revisit before publishing
- Moderation queue with community voting and rapid takedown for clearly defamatory or illegal content
How it works
Next.js on Vercel, PostgreSQL for storage.
Status
In active maintenance.
See it
- Live: tablon.xyz
- Code: private — ask me
- Contact: hello@damianvidalc.com