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by cbhl 4843 days ago
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.
1 comments
trevorah 4843 days ago
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.

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jschuur 4843 days ago
Just hit the profile page URL and get the HTTP staus code. If https://twitter.com/ksdhbfslbflsdbs returns 404, it's not available.

Not quit the same (a username might be reserved internally), but either way, nobody else can use the name.

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trevorah 4843 days ago
Yep, thats pretty much how it works at the moment (see https://github.com/trevorah/usernique/blob/master/server.js). The issue is that the server is sending out quite a few of these hits to twitter, and twitter is smart enough to start reject requests when things get a bit too much.
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nsp 4843 days ago
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
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jlogsdon 4843 days ago
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.
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nsp 4843 days ago
I meant to fix the false positives on the domain name availability, or is that issue related somehow?
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cbhl 4841 days ago
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.)

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