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Craiglist introduces phone verification systems; spammers are not happy
- comatose_kid 18y agoI wonder if it would be worth my while to create a web service that does this for any site?
- prakash 18y agoGood idea. And integrate is as a hosted/managed service similar to discuss.
- vaksel 18y agothis looks pretty much like it http://www.phoneconfirm.com/ http://www.phoneconfirm.com/
- comatose_kid 18y agoThanks for the link. I think there is room to improve on the pricing. I wonder if there are other outfits that do this.
- spolsky 18y agoAnother one is http://www.maxmind.com/app/telephone_overview http://www.maxmind.com/app/telephone_overview This is a classy company, very reliable. We've been using them successfully for years for fraud prevention in online credit card charging.
- ScottWhigham 18y agoHere. here. We use MaxMind.com for their GeoIP product too
- sethg 18y agoHow does phone verification work with customers who are deaf? Does the API could provide an option where the computer calling the customer plays Baudot code [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code] instead of speaking the numbers in English?
- pgebhard 18y agoText messages could work in that case, no?
- Tichy 18y agoMaybe, but on the other hand it would be painful if many sites would start using phone verification.
- Hexstream 18y agoI always imagined "underground" stuff like this was on member-only forums... "They've just started doing this in the computer services section too. I'm seriously freaking out now because I make the majority of my income off that section. I'm a freelance designer. I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills if I can't find a way around this. Anyone have a suggestion? Please?" What about finding legitimate work that creates value instead of destroying it?! Fuckwad. edit: I'm craving for a blockquote feature. Double quotes + italics is a poor substitute and double quotes alone are downright confusing if there's more than one paragraph. edit2: I note that there's 2 requests for a blockquote feature in the appropriate section and they almost have no upmods. Is that representative of the opinion about the (non-)usefulness of such a feature? (hope you don't mind the offtopicness)
- pg 18y agoBlockquoting is on my list to add soon.
- boredguy8 18y agoOne of the things I like about not having block quoting is that people tend to be far more careful about what they quote. It keeps the discussion focused while also being visually pleasant. So, "Yay!" blockquotes, but a bitter-sweet "yay" and one that includes a, "Can it be done better?"
- hollerith 18y agoWell, there could be a limit to the number of characters in the BLOCKQUOTE element.
- Hexstream 18y agoI don't find it visually pleasant at all when I get confused about what's quoted and what's not, and when everyone is forced to come up with their own quoting scheme since it's not supported. Some use double quotes, some use italics, some use double-quoted italics... It's a mess. I'd much prefer a consistent representation for blockquotes for ease of reading and semantics. It's the Right Thing.
- eznet 18y agoThank God! Craig's List is a cesspool for BS Ads - hopefully this will cut the craptacular of manipulative ads that have been on there traditionally. It is f'n funny to see the low-life, scumbag, POS, donkey-raping, child molestering, masturbating monkeys(wait, Linus reserved that one for the OpenBSD community) that make up the "professional spammer community" whining about loosing their free ride. Boo-hoo. Maybe CraigsList will be worth a crap now.
- rudyfink 18y agoBy the end of the thread there is price competition for batches of 100s of verified accounts. I'm not terribly optimistic in how successful this will be.
- ScottWhigham 18y agoBut are "100s of verified accounts" scalable? I don't know that "100s of verified accounts" will make a big, long-term dent. How long before CL cancels those accounts? I'm sure CL is watching this like a hawk and will shut an account down quickly and for little reason in an attempt to prevent early gaming-the-system.
- pageman 18y agoyou can always use vumber and tossabledigits
- comatose_kid 18y agoFrom reading the thread, it seemed that these didn't work, or were not cost-effective.
- fdb 18y agoOne of the blackhats proposed a clever outside-of-the-box solution: 1. Create a site that promises free ringtones. 2. Once a visitor enters their cell number, forward it to Craigslist, who sends a verification call to that number. 3. Ask them to enter the verification code on your ringtone site. 4. Redirect the verification code to Craigslist, and send your visitor a ringtone. This is how CAPTCHA's got cracked as well: by embedding them into porn. ("Would you like me to take off my dress? Enter this code") It sounds hard to beat. Any other outside-of-the-box solutions that you can think of?
- comatose_kid 18y agoFree ringtones might work, but I doubt a lot of people would give their phone numbers to a porn site...
- jmtame 18y agoI didn't think of that.. pretty creative, and it looks like it would work, although it's kind of sad that this creativity is going towards blackhat practices.
- vaksel 18y agowhat they need to do is come up with a better captcha method, ie. right now all of them are just trying to make the image itself as hard to read as possible, and for a lot of them you can try 5 times w/o getting wtf the captcha says.
- kenver 18y agoWas anyone else tempted to give that forum a taste of its own medicine! It's such a shame that they're spending this much effort trying to ruin something so useful for short term gain.
- rms 18y agofair game