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Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website?

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Re: Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website?

#11
post #10

It may seem obvious, but add an registration through oauth providers like google and facebook. It should trim down the amount without a lot of impact I guess. If all that abuse is in Russian you might just try to deny service if Russian language is used or add an extra hurdle like browser fingerprinting and rejecting the combo language + fingerprint within a timeframe. Depending on your user demographic you could als…

This. Require auth, it also allows you to add stuff like rate limiting per account to further prevent abuse.

Re: Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website?

#12
post #4

Have the text checked by a dictionary and if < 50% (or whatever is needed) fails then don't send the text.

The attacker could just pull the text from a dictionary and bypass this check. Also as another commenter noted there could be legitimate traffic that is in another language.

Re: Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website?

#13
Require registration. Block VPNs (as the people doing it are more likely trying to hide their true IP). If someone wants to use a VPN, require documenation. Be open about your limits.

But to be honest, the people that are abusing your system, more then likely they are doing it for financial gain, so it's likely their full time job, and they won't stop.

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