Ruby on rails dev here.
This question has been asked before. Here, here and here.
The problem is that they did not make the right question or the solution given was somewhat shallow.
I ´ll be as specific as I can.
The Goal
I want get the user´s contact e-mail and not the account e-mail. Two different things. :)
Some users leave their email on the contact button. It´s public.
My goal is to make a software that can extract e-mails, but for now, only extracting one e-mail from one single account will be more than enough to have my MVP going.
here is an example below on how instagram let users share their e-mail.
The Problem
It only shows in app :( If it were to be shown on the browser as well, it would be a walk in the park. The contact button that has the e-mail and phone number does not show in the browser.
**The Good Part*
There is some solutions to it.
This guy has a figured it out using the API, but I don´t quite understand how he did it. The downside is that all solution wants to sell you a product.
The focus of this company lies on extracting instagram e-mails and it seems legit.
Last but not least, this dude is using appium to extract those juicy e-mails. The third won´t really work for me because it seems too messy. Having to use a android emulator will be my last resort.
Thanks for helping and happy new year.
Set up mitmproxy on your machine.
Set up the certificates on your phone and use your machine as the gateway.
Analyze the traffic.
Reverse engineer the API (to log in and get info about user profiles) and then use it in your Ruby/Python/whatever code.
I have few apps in PlayStore. A user(fake probably) is leaving negative reviews in all of my app. I want to know his email id/or any mode of contact by which i can contact/recognise him/her. Is it possible?
No, and if it was possible it would be a huge privacy violation for that user. You have two things you can do though:
if the reviews are abusive, then you can flag them
you can reply to the review in the Play Console. If you leave a polite reply asking them to give more detail, apologizing for any problems, and give them a way to contact you, then they might contact you. If they don't contact you, then at least anyone who sees the bad review can see that you care about customer service. Then they can guess that the review might be unfair, and your good, polite customer service might be a bigger positive than any negative effect of the review.
I am researching whether the following is possible and if so how I could go about achieving it.
We collect reviews for businesses from their customers and we’d like to post these reviews to Google places as part of the reviews they have on their.
I was wondering how I would go about getting our website to “push” this data to the Google places website, I’ve done lots of searching on the APIs but have found nothing that says it’s possible or not.
Currently the Google Places API does not have write capability. It only has read capability. Right now only ratings are available, but I suspect reviews might come someday too.
Although you can send check-in signals and fix Places through the API. Hopefully Google will add the ability to send reviews and receive them.
If you're looking to get your content added to Google, you may want to talk to their content partnerships teams http://www.google.com/support/mapcontentpartners/
Since Google's local and maps initiatives are under the same people that would be the place to go.
I too looked into this as it would be of huge value to companies if possible.
My research led me to believe that it is not possible and could possibly violate Google's TOA with negative results for the company's Places page.
Instead, I built a workaround that makes it really easy for companies to collect feedback and get their own customers to submit the reviews: http://dallasmarketingservices.com/survey-local-unveiled-how-online-reviews-affect-your-local-business/
Maybe we will see this in the future though.
I employ email validation to grant people full use of the site. The trouble is, sometimes these emails get spam-boxed, or never arrive, so I get many people complaining that they cannot confirm their account.
Was wondering if there are other (creative) ways to offer secondary validation option to users who didnt get the validation. Its a free site, so I dont want to ask for credit cards, or mobile #s.
The purpose of this is to make abuse of the site less rampant, since we ban a lot of people, and they come back with dozens of accounts to prove something. Spam/robot registrations are not an issue (right now).
What we started doing recently was letting members send us an email to a special email address. We give them a hash code, and all they have to do is put that code somewhere in the subject or the body of the email, and send it to us. We have a cron job running in the background that gets those emails, parses the subject/body looking for the hash, and if found activates the account.
It doesn't work 100%, because some ISPs also block their users from sending us emails, but no solution would work 100%.
Based on your comment in Rob S.' answer, it sounds more like you want to identify situations where the same browser is creating multiple accounts rather than confirm that what's at the other end is human.
Dropping a cookie in the user's browser can be very helpful in finding the repeat offenders, especially those not savvy enough to clear their cookies or visit while in private mode. Some forum software like vBulletin does this and can notify the administrators when it happens.
Another alternative might be browser fingerprinting, which is where you use a bunch of the information provided in the HTTP exchange. An example of this is the EFF's Panopticlick.
Just got a "fun" new way to annoy your banned people a bit.
once you ban them (I guess you close the account and ban the IP). Then log their browser agent string with their IP and screen resolution.
If there is a match when showing the website to them. Just remove the registration link/page. Dont even show the link to the page, as it might piss them off. Dont explain why its gone. Just keep it gone, eg. for 3 weeks or 2 month.
That way they dont have a cookie on the browser to remove, they cant find the registration so they cant know WHY they cant make a new account.
Secondly, if on a school or something (dont know how old they are), the other existing users will still be able to login to their accounts as its ONLY registration that has been removed. Not login.
How about that? is that clever enough?
Basically what you're looking to do is separate the humans from the robots. There are two primary ways to do this:
1) Require users signing up to check boxes and type a word spelled out in an image captcha. These are usually very difficult tasks for a computer to complete.
2) Allow users to sign-up using their account from a different site such as OpenID or Google assuming that anyone who has one of these accounts is a real person.
I recommend combining both methodologies.
Good luck!
There are unlimited ways of doing this.
You mention mobiles and free, but if you have access to a SMS-gateway, you can receive SMS-messages for free (but might need to pay some sort of monthly subscription though). But show a dynamically generated code the the current user. Store this code in "his session" and do an ajax check each 15-30 sec to see if the sms-code was received by the gateway. If so, accept the account and let them registrate. This would requiere the gateway + your users to have a personal mobile. Enough about mobiles...
Make a question or more that is randomly generated. Use pictures/tokens instad of tekst so that the user has to press the correct image in correct order to perform some sort of answer.
Could be like a jackpot-machine with 3 cells where the images are randomly placed and generated inside dynamic named files, so that robots cant analyse the names to guess the right answer.
You mention e-mails to be easy to spoof. Yes indeed, but what if the emails would come lets say each week containing some sort of "important info" that the user would need to read/use on the website to continue. Once the account hasnt been used for a certain time (lets say 3 month, kill it)... and you could also say to have a "free account" you must accept that we send you 1 mail pr. month that you need to activate within 1 week. If you dont, we are free to close/delete your account details.
... and many more
I dont know what you want to "protect", but if its for gaming, then dont let the gamers have "extra levels/weapons" until they have provided a certain amount of these codes OR paid for access OR validated by phone or something.
Thats my first 3 ideas, I think the possibilities are unlimited. The main issue here is, make it too hard to validate yourself and the users go away unless your site is REALLY worth it.
You might think of the much used "Free forever (but limited)" approach way of selling stuff these days on the net. The users can make as many accounts they want, but the licens is still only "single/small/basic". Once you get more experienced, you get more features or you might just upgrade by paying... at this time you know WHO is real and WHO isnt.
My point is, dont over protect. Just design with the mind of spammers will always find a way in, no matter how good you protect it. Those giving up first are your real users/customers.
I would rather spend time on making this product/website/game so great that EVERYONE wants to pay for an account after a while.
Lastly from real life... there are COMPANIES in China with kids employeed to play World of Warcraft with one purpose. Harvest virtual gold and sell it on Ebay to other western players who pays with real dollars. Its not allowed according to the gamelicens and their accounts/gameslicenses are constantly getting banned. But it gives them so much income so they have calculated with this and they just buy new licences and continue.
So if EVEN Blizard(WoW creators)
doesnt have enough power/money to keep
fakes out of the game, how do you
expect to do much better? :o)
Usefull answer?
I might be missing something but I'm trying to implement a contacts retrieval mechanism akin to the one that is offered by Google for Yahoo and Hotmail. Both APIs seem to require the user to actually go to their sites to log in. The documentation is really convoluted for both. I was hoping someone has done this and can point me to a simple way (if there is one) to allow the user to log in directly in my app and then for me to go and fetch their contacts for them (preferably in XML, but JSON would also do nicely).
I currently have a Perl script that goes and gets the gmail stuff and works very nicely. I was (maybe wildly optimistically) hoping that Yahoo and Microsoft would have similarly useful mechanisms.
Check out Open Inviter: http://openinviter.com. It has Yahoo, Hotmail, and many more :)
Seems http://openinviter.com domain is no more. There are few other providers available in market out of which I liked https://socialinviter.com, give it a try.