Idea is awesome. I like how the usernames are generated in the first place. It doesn't work, however. I've been looking for simple things that I can hack up to help me learn ruby, so I made a little Ruby version using this idea. "UNameGen"
Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
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Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#42Any feedback would be really cool...
you should be clearer about what the site does without ruining the simplicity. I was shown the site and didn't notice the title, so it caught me off guard. it appeared to be someone's about page rather than a generator.
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a node guy, but I found this module for Whois checks - https://npmjs.org/package/whois-available It uses the IANA Whois service, an admittedly cursory look doesn't turn up anything re: rate limits, but you could just do a get request on the root url and only check Whois if it 404s to be safe. http://www.iana.org/whois
Whois wouldn't help here. The problem is that so many requests are going to twitter.com/[username] that they start sending false 404s (or some other error, not 200) because of rate limiting.
I meant to fix the false positives on the domain name availability, or is that issue related somehow?
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. Judging from the way the server.js is written, I'd expect he's being rate-limited, and the server returns free whenever the HTTP call doesn't return 200. Edit: Just to be sure, I threw in a breakpoint on line 18 of generate.js, and set name to my username (cbhl) -- and got a false "free" result for both Twitter and GitHub. The OP might need to be getting OAuth tokens and using the GitHub/Twitter APIs.
Any tips to sort this out? How are things being rate limited? edit: just realised you meant that twitter/github etc are rate limiting my requests. Bummer.
If you can figure out how to do the request on the client side, that would mitigate the issue.
Otherwise, I'd say you're probably out of luck. (You could try doing the query over IPv6, but eventually they'll just block the entire subnet, so I don't know if it's worth the trouble.)