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."'"

Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I'm Sorry But That's Ridiculous

[darkmeridian]

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.

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! [wittyrpg.com] does and it works well.

Re:He sounds like a douche...

[pavon]

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.

Re:He sounds like a douche...

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be missing the entire point. Mailinator does not send out emails. Mailinator provides throwaway email addresses for you to use for signups. It is read-only, not write-only. It is impossible to spam someone via Mailinator.

Re:Summary

[nitehawk214]

Thanks AC. Why the fuck couldn't TFS had just said this? Your summary makes more sense than TFS, TFA, or the Bitcoin BS post.

Re:Summary

[SuricouRaven]

At least one muck does likewise, but in their case it's for another reason: They want an address they can be sure is legally traceable to turn over should the police request it. The operators are very legally cautious, as it's a place where lots of sexual scenes get played out, and they want a way to make sure that should drama occur they can pass the buck and not need to be involved any more than they must.

It's a common fear of small service operators - one user commits a crime, and the investigators may just sieze the entire server and the backups to be sure they get everything of use to them.

Re:Translation

[Onymous Coward]

etc...

Therein lies the rub.

Re:Summary

[TheRaven64]

Seriously? The only email address that you have is one that is controlled by the whim of a third party? If you're going to use gmail, at the very least you should register a domain and tell gmail to do that, then if Google decides to cancel your account (which they are entitled to do, for any reason), you don't lose your email address.

Blocking gmail is used to block competitors

[erice]

My friends run into this a lot when signing up for free seminars. The idea is to prevent employees of their competiors from attending their events. Competitor domains are blocked (obviously) but also well known ISP's and free web mail services like Gmail because a employee of a competitor can easily hide there. The whole process is quite leaky though. There are just too many domains to check. If you have a personal domain or even a lesser known ISP, they let you in rather than trying to figure out what or who you are.