Ask HN: How did Facebook initially limit users to universities? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did Facebook initially limit users to universities?

5 pointsbsbechtel9 comments

Hi all, I'm wondering, programatically, how Facebook initially limited people joining their site to those at specific universities (i.e., @harvard.edu).

Was it as simple as cross referencing the user's email domain to a list stored on their servers of approved schools and then confirming the account through email? I feel like there should be a more robust solution, but I'm not sure what it could be.

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Limited to specific domains (::Universities), I'm not sure of, but before they opened it to public registrations, the requirement was that you had to have a .edu e-mail address.

You had to have an e-mail address from a University at the time. There probably isn't anything more robust for checking if you're enrolled at a certain University than having to click a link sent to your University e-mail.

I am not an expert, but as i can see, when they first started from Harvard in 2004, they restricted the access to only @harvard,edu address (must have had some sort of Java script validation to check and allow only that domain)and later when they expanded to diff universities the same validations must have been modified.

I would expect a bit more than JS validation as that's only client slide.

you already answered your own question. They limited signups to only people with @hardvard.edu addresses. When they expanded they just added more schools to that list of approved addresses

It's not especially robust, but restricting access to .edu email addresses helped to enforce the image of exclusivity, which only made the possession of an account more desirable.

An easy solution today would be to just restrict people based on what school they have in their FB profile ;-)

In the UK I think they just required an email ending .ac.uk

Back at that time, or a bit earlier, many commercial software products offered "academic" licenses that were (also) sold by third parties. And in the earlier cases of this, often "validation" of eligibility consisted of demonstrating that one had a .edu email address.

So yes, people really did use email addresses as qualifiers, including for significant commercial transactions.

(Although some might argue, if you as the licensor weren't willing to setting for a .edu address as proof, you might as well settle for no-revenue piracy. And some others would argue that, licensed or pirated, initial uptake was crucial to driving further sales e.g. when such people landed in jobs where licenses were purchased -- they'd buy what they or the employees knew and were proficient with.

So, regardless of the particular rationale employed, email addresses were used as "proof".)

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