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by eat_veggies 2879 days ago
That'd be interesting--a small, maybe even just $1-10, deposit that gets refunded if the bug is legitimate.

I don't think punishing dupes is a good idea though, because a researcher has no idea (and should have no idea) whether their bug has been found before, so dupes should probably still result in a refund.

However, as a kid who has no credit card, but has found some pretty spicy bugs (and gotten rewarded for them), it would make it impossible for me to report them.

3 comments

We definitely don't want to discourage you from contributing. It also doesn't necessarily have to be money, you could stake reputation you've previously earned.

The dupes problem is super important, in my opinion, because it's currently an unpleasant experience for both sides. Not getting paid out for valid work that has simply been reported before (but not disclosed) can make doing this kind of research as a freelancer unfeasible, while triaging duplicate reports burns time for dev teams.

We've tried to build out in-scope/out-of-scope functionality that makes it super simple to keep your scopes current (could even update automatically via API). We definitely want to build out additional functionality that makes publicly acknowledging known, 'won't fix', and non-impactful issues super easy, perhaps by pulling most of the information from a duplicate report. Do you think that’d be useful?

The other thing we want to really focus on is the disclosure process, and encouraging companies to do it as often and soon as possible.

You could try a prepaid card. The overhead was $5 when I used them. They were good for keeping my real card numbers out of circulation, too.
Honestly, I think a 99 cent fee could help to remove a lot of the noise.