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

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."'"

Comments

Re:Summary

[Mad Merlin]

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.