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How To Get Websites To Ban Sign-ups From Gmail.com Accounts

Posted by Soulskill on from the battle-of-the-scripts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Tyma describes a simple, elegant, and hilarious method that Mailinator (hypothetically, of course) used to mess around with people who scraped its webpages in order to block its alternate domains. Quoting: 'Remember all that script-detecting code from the anti-abuse system? Well, what if I put that in here too, I thought. Let's "detect" when a script is hitting our weensy alternate-domain page. ... And what if after about 30 page hits from the same script (or so), stop displaying actual alternate domains and start sprinkling in some other things. Hmm... but what other things? I know — how about "gmail.com". Or, um, "hotmail.com". Or maybe, "yahoo.com."'"

5 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Makes no fucking sense. A/C's bitcoin post above makes more sense.

    1. Re:Summary by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It baffles me that people still require email addresses for random account signups. Either people are going to provide their email address, or they're not. Make it required and they'll just feed you a fake/disposable one, or not make an account at all. How about you treat your (potential) users with some respect and just make the email optional? That's what Game! does and it works well.

      --
      Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
  2. I'm Sorry But That's Ridiculous by darkmeridian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The scrapers would just remove gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, all .edu and .gov domains, and leave in aol.com. Website owners probably know that most of their traffic comes from relatively few domains so as long as those are not banned, they ought to be okay. The people who were incorrectly banned would just complain and then the website owners can judge the domains one by one.

    --
    A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
  3. Re:He sounds like a douche... by pavon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    shrug.. none of my business I suppose since I haven't heard of him, but I would be furious if I got that kind of response from an "anti-spam" company when asking them to stop spamming me.

    How does Mailinator spam anybody? They don't send any email, just receive it. And they don't facilitate forum spam any more than any other free email service.

  4. Re:Translation by Onymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    etc...

    Therein lies the rub.