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Comment by monological | Hacker News Reader

I apologize, my server got banned by HN, thus all registrations are failing. Pg can you unban the server's IP: 216.70.83.132?

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No you don't need to do that. Just stop asking for a user's password. This way you're doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing: this is filtering the smart people out. Only naive users enter their password on a website that has just been created, exists for like five minutes, has a handful of jobs on it, and happened to make it to the HN homepage claiming to be a job site. I'd almost create a similar site, then post all password in a heavily hashed form so that users can check and confirm it's valid while not actually revealing their password.

How should I authenticate then? I could always let the user put a token in their profile, which I can scan for, but I can't do that either because the IP is blocked and I can't scrape the profile.

You could have people reply to a post somewhere (like in this thread, or one post in this thread). You can make a cronjob that checks every 10-30 seconds, which won't get you banned and is a reasonable time to wait for verification.

Profiles is another option but this requires more traffic and you probably need to authenticate to view profiles (which is not a problem, but there are probably more restrictions on accounts to keep bots out).

It's not even about trusting your website with my HN password, it's about the way it's asked. If people do this, they might do the exact same on any scam website. This kind of behavior shouldn't be encouraged. Even e-mail isn't considered safe to transmit password on, and that's supposed to be private.

You got banned for a reason so why would he unban you?

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