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Comment by ramijames | Hacker News Reader

I run a mid-sized job board (https://miserablyunemployed.com/) and I deal with a substantial amount of reports from users about jobs that aren't accurate or don't exist. They get taken down immediately.

The worse offenders are the companies that are using fake jobs to drive traffic to their sites. There is a special place in hell for those people.

I wish that legal systems were better equipped to deal with bad actors that obey the letter of the law, but skirt ethical and moral boundaries. I think a lot of the worst things in the world would get fixed if we had some better way of dealing with them.

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How do you deal with false reports about bona fide jobs, but from malicious actors, such as competitors or trolls?

I have a blacklist that filters them out at scrape-time.

I am not sure that makes any sense in the context of what I asked, and it also seems to imply that your business is based on scraping others' sites, which is a bad look.

Also you chose a horrendous name for it. Holy crap, I would never sign up to a site with that name, not to look for actual work! Much less a bottom-feeding scraper bot! Most job boards try to keep sort of an upbeat or optimistic mood, at least!

You're right, my answer wasn't clear. I'm saying that I've identified a few places that actively produce job listings with the sole intent of getting you to sign up for their service. It's a dark pattern and I've banned them for it.

As for the name: It was an intentional brand choice. I'm not trying to build "most job boards" and I'm sick of toxic positivity. Don't like the name? Use Indeed or LinkedIn instead. It's your choice.

Lastly, your characterization of the site as a "bottom-feeding scraper bot" says more about how you view technology than it does about the site. By that measure, Google is the same thing as it goes out on a schedule, scrapes site for content, creates an index, and serves that to users who query. It's a one-to-one mapping.

May I ask: Is this crawler based, I guess?

(because you have some niche jobs/countries on there with some postings :-)

Ya, I spent a month building a pretty complex scraper system that targets ~75-100K companies around the world and manually scrapes their career pages. It was just a fun thing for me to do and it morphed into something useful for others. I had never built a scraping system from the ground up and I really enjoyed it.

that is a good looking job board. except i am missing a filter for the type of work, like IT, software, marketing, design, etc. also filtering by industry would be nice. and part-time/contract options. there seems to be a remote filter, but it's a bit confusing how to activate that.

I appreciate that, and the feedback. Will find some time over the weekend to add it. We already have these facets, I just don't expose them in the filters. Good call.

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