5 ms·

Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America

21 points by caroyannis 12y ago

huhtenberg 12y ago
This is open to abuse and resulting legal backlash from affected properties. What is it that prevents me from submitting a bug report for a W hotel?
- caroyannis 12y ago
  Hey there! I actually thought about this quite a bit, and I can see how that would be a big issue, especially for property owners. In the next while I'm going to implement accounts for building managers to be able to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I'm hoping this provides people with an easy way to remove fraudulent claims.
  - m0dE 12y ago
    The property owners dont have time and dont want anything to do with your site. In fact, they are probably oblivious to your site's existence. How are you going to prevent harming properties' reputation without any involvement from the properties? Because, one way or another, their reputation is at risk through your site. You should look into how tripadvisor deals with hotels. I believe there's been lawsuits, but the tripadvisor is powerful.
    - brandonhsiao 12y ago
      By the time the site gets big enough to make a dent in the properties' reputations, that will also be around the time property owners start hearing about it.
gkop 12y ago
As far as I can tell the bed bug claims and identities of the reporters are not independently verified. I have an incentive to false-report on a property I myself hope to subsequently rent or purchase in order to reduce the price I pay. How do you deal with my fraudulent reporting?
- caroyannis 12y ago
  I'm planning on implementing accounts for building managers/landlords with the power to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I actually have most of the backend for this already complete but I was waiting to see how useful people thought this would be. Apparently very!
MayanAstronaut 12y ago
Any name and shame sites do not last due to the overload of fake reviews and opinions. The only way is to verify that they stayed there, like what airbnb does or other hoteling and hosteling site do.
wallawe 12y ago
The design is great, did you do all of the design/front-end work on your own?
- caroyannis 12y ago
  Thanks, I appreciate it! (: Yup, I did the entire website, front and backend.
coryl 12y ago
Cool, I actually thought about doing the same thing after I saw how out of date bedbugregistry.com was. Hope you have some good SEO implementation as I believe people typing in prospective apartment addresses is probably the biggest lead for traffic.
idlewords 12y ago
It looks like you scraped a bunch of data from my website (bedbugregistry.com) and put a different UI on it. That's pretty lame. There are lots of worthy projects around bedbug tracking that you could do, particularly if you want to focus on specific cities. But please do the work yourself, and use your own data.
- Udo 12y ago
  Okay, as someone who doesn't know anything about both sites, a casual test (surveying results for Toronto, ON) does not suggest any data was lifted off your site. In fact, there is just one entry for all of Toronto on Bedbug Registry, whereas Bedbug Lookup seems to have dozens. Of course it's possible that your search simply doesn't work, there are copious error messages on Bedbug Registry... Can you give more details about what you think was scraped from you? At most BedbugLookup seems to be a superset of your site data. Edit: seems the search on BBR is not working for me (and apparently for me only). Thanks for providing the links, I see that the data was indeed scraped. Not cool.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    For example, all of the reports on this first page of Toronto results are from my site: http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on Ditto for Vancouver and NYC. I stopped looking after that.
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  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    I found my reviews I wrote on the bedbug registry back in 2008 on this site. Definitely scraped
dobbsbob 12y ago
This is needed, because the bedbugregistry seems abandoned and has submission errors where you can't add new entries to some addresses. One problem is legal backlash, I would have hosted this overseas like the bedbugregistry did to prevent takedown notices and lawsuits. This is helpful when dealing with lying landlords who claim there was never a problem until you moved in, so it must be something you did and refuse to pay for treatment, refund damage deposits and generally screw you over. Then you go on one of these bug registry sites and discover they've had bedbug infestations for years.
- idlewords 12y ago
  The Bedbug Registry is hosted here in sunny California. I don't hide from lawsuits.
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    I thought it was run out of Romania http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/
    - idlewords 12y ago
      I was living in Romania when that article came out, but the site is hosted in the US.
alexcason 12y ago
If you only started this in 2014 then how do you have reports dating from 2012 and 2013 (and earlier too?)?
- idlewords 12y ago
  One weird trick for filling your website with bedbug reports... you won't believe what happened next.
stockninja 12y ago
One problem -- Many Airbnb's don't list the actual address until the transaction is processed. Maybe you could include airbnb 'listings' -- but i guess the host could just change the listing ... something to think about.
caroyannis 12y ago
This is a small project I'd started a couple months ago to help myself find and report bed bugs when apartment hunting. All of the other websites that are similar to this are either broken (don't allow you to submit new reports), or are confusing to navigate. I'm starting with 17 cities in North America.
- fourstar 12y ago
  http://bedbugregistry.com http://bedbugregistry.com is pretty easy to navigate and it's been around for almost 10 years. In fact, it looks like you're pulling the same data from there as well. Is that legal?
  - exhilaration 12y ago
    I came here to say the same thing - I've been checking the above site for years before booking any hotel.
  - caroyannis 12y ago
    For a lot of cities, that website is actually quite broken: you can't submit new addresses or reports. In Vancouver, BC (where I'm from) you haven't been able to submit new reports for 2+ years unless you're using their iOS app. A majority of the website is outdated and I wanted to make a resource to fix that problem.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      I'm not sure that makes it OK to scrape and re-host their data.

21 points by caroyannis 12y ago

This is open to abuse and resulting legal backlash from affected properties. What is it that prevents me from submitting a bug report for a W hotel?

caroyannis 12y ago
Hey there! I actually thought about this quite a bit, and I can see how that would be a big issue, especially for property owners. In the next while I'm going to implement accounts for building managers to be able to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I'm hoping this provides people with an easy way to remove fraudulent claims.
- m0dE 12y ago
  The property owners dont have time and dont want anything to do with your site. In fact, they are probably oblivious to your site's existence. How are you going to prevent harming properties' reputation without any involvement from the properties? Because, one way or another, their reputation is at risk through your site. You should look into how tripadvisor deals with hotels. I believe there's been lawsuits, but the tripadvisor is powerful.
  - brandonhsiao 12y ago
    By the time the site gets big enough to make a dent in the properties' reputations, that will also be around the time property owners start hearing about it.

gkop 12y ago

As far as I can tell the bed bug claims and identities of the reporters are not independently verified. I have an incentive to false-report on a property I myself hope to subsequently rent or purchase in order to reduce the price I pay. How do you deal with my fraudulent reporting?

caroyannis 12y ago
I'm planning on implementing accounts for building managers/landlords with the power to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I actually have most of the backend for this already complete but I was waiting to see how useful people thought this would be. Apparently very!

MayanAstronaut 12y ago

Any name and shame sites do not last due to the overload of fake reviews and opinions. The only way is to verify that they stayed there, like what airbnb does or other hoteling and hosteling site do.

wallawe 12y ago

The design is great, did you do all of the design/front-end work on your own?

caroyannis 12y ago
Thanks, I appreciate it! (: Yup, I did the entire website, front and backend.

coryl 12y ago

Cool, I actually thought about doing the same thing after I saw how out of date bedbugregistry.com was. Hope you have some good SEO implementation as I believe people typing in prospective apartment addresses is probably the biggest lead for traffic.

idlewords 12y ago

It looks like you scraped a bunch of data from my website (bedbugregistry.com) and put a different UI on it. That's pretty lame. There are lots of worthy projects around bedbug tracking that you could do, particularly if you want to focus on specific cities. But please do the work yourself, and use your own data.

Udo 12y ago
Okay, as someone who doesn't know anything about both sites, a casual test (surveying results for Toronto, ON) does not suggest any data was lifted off your site. In fact, there is just one entry for all of Toronto on Bedbug Registry, whereas Bedbug Lookup seems to have dozens. Of course it's possible that your search simply doesn't work, there are copious error messages on Bedbug Registry... Can you give more details about what you think was scraped from you? At most BedbugLookup seems to be a superset of your site data. Edit: seems the search on BBR is not working for me (and apparently for me only). Thanks for providing the links, I see that the data was indeed scraped. Not cool.
- idlewords 12y ago
  For example, all of the reports on this first page of Toronto results are from my site: http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on Ditto for Vancouver and NYC. I stopped looking after that.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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- dobbsbob 12y ago
  I found my reviews I wrote on the bedbug registry back in 2008 on this site. Definitely scraped

dobbsbob 12y ago

This is needed, because the bedbugregistry seems abandoned and has submission errors where you can't add new entries to some addresses. One problem is legal backlash, I would have hosted this overseas like the bedbugregistry did to prevent takedown notices and lawsuits. This is helpful when dealing with lying landlords who claim there was never a problem until you moved in, so it must be something you did and refuse to pay for treatment, refund damage deposits and generally screw you over. Then you go on one of these bug registry sites and discover they've had bedbug infestations for years.

idlewords 12y ago
The Bedbug Registry is hosted here in sunny California. I don't hide from lawsuits.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  I thought it was run out of Romania http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/
  - idlewords 12y ago
    I was living in Romania when that article came out, but the site is hosted in the US.

alexcason 12y ago

If you only started this in 2014 then how do you have reports dating from 2012 and 2013 (and earlier too?)?

idlewords 12y ago
One weird trick for filling your website with bedbug reports... you won't believe what happened next.

stockninja 12y ago

One problem -- Many Airbnb's don't list the actual address until the transaction is processed. Maybe you could include airbnb 'listings' -- but i guess the host could just change the listing ... something to think about.

caroyannis 12y ago

This is a small project I'd started a couple months ago to help myself find and report bed bugs when apartment hunting. All of the other websites that are similar to this are either broken (don't allow you to submit new reports), or are confusing to navigate. I'm starting with 17 cities in North America.

fourstar 12y ago
http://bedbugregistry.com http://bedbugregistry.com is pretty easy to navigate and it's been around for almost 10 years. In fact, it looks like you're pulling the same data from there as well. Is that legal?
- exhilaration 12y ago
  I came here to say the same thing - I've been checking the above site for years before booking any hotel.
- caroyannis 12y ago
  For a lot of cities, that website is actually quite broken: you can't submit new addresses or reports. In Vancouver, BC (where I'm from) you haven't been able to submit new reports for 2+ years unless you're using their iOS app. A majority of the website is outdated and I wanted to make a resource to fix that problem.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I'm not sure that makes it OK to scrape and re-host their data.