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question Why does NameBio prevent price copying?

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If you try to copy the transaction prices from NameBio and paste them elsewhere, you'll find that the prices change to other numbers, even though all the other text remains correct. Why is that?

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If you try to copy the transaction prices from NameBio and paste them elsewhere, you'll find that the prices change to other numbers, even though all the other text remains correct. Why is that?

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From this semi-related 2016 NameBio Extraction thread:

We haven't returned false data as a response to scraping since I re-launched the site at the beginning of last year. While it is funny, I had concerns for exactly the reasons you mentioned. That comment was in reference to buying data from certain other sites who have stolen what we collected in the past, their data is definitely bad. I think this was only done after manual review though, not automatically.

What we do now is throttle/ban, and people can contact us in the very rare event that they triggered something manually. I'll occasionally change a sale price here and there by a few bucks to see who is publishing scraped data, but I don't do this often, usually just in response to seeing something suspicious.

I don't want to get too much into our algorithms for detecting scraping, but I will say it would require some pretty unusual activity and has nothing to do with volume. I don't consider trying to work around the 100 result limit to be suspicious, I've actually suggested ways for people to get around it because I hate it. It's only in place because it makes it very difficult to get every sale in the entire database without doing some really weird searches for a prolonged period of time.

I am aware of DNBolt, they got a big chunk of the data before we had any algorithms in place and we were just doing basic throttling. Then I noticed and started putting in some advanced detection measures, and we went back and forth for a few months one-upping each other. He's very clever, but as it stands I would be pretty impressed if someone could get all of the data, and we haven't accidentally blocked anyone in a while who wasn't trying to grab all of the sales.

All that said Adam and I both believe that data should be free and open, the anti-scraping is mostly about protecting quality of service and reducing costs. Having to support hundreds of thousands of bot requests can slow down the site or increase our hosting costs. What we'd really like to do it just make the data available for download, but once the data is out there it can never be undone, so we're taking our time with that decision.

If you ever get blocked shoot me a PM with your IP, or submit our contact form, and I'll take care of it. I'm also happy to help with custom data requests when I can.

Obviously things have changed at NameBio since 2016... But I think the anti-scraping justification of protecting their quality of service and reducing costs sentiment likely still applies today.
 
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they should make everyone sign in just to see the data anyway.
 
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