[nlh]

I love that you’re tackling this problem, and congrats on launching and getting this on HN!

This does feel like a real problem. The thing that concerns me (and likely other devs here) is that it adds an additional remote API dependency for a very core part of a system when a lot of people are trying to keep those dependencies to an absolute minimum. When your service goes down (not if), everyone who’s dependent on you will not be able to register new users, etc.

Is there any way you can offer this as a library instead? You deserve to get paid of course - maybe provide the library and initial data and charge for updates / premium checks, something like that.

[choraria]

Super valid and fair. Thanks for taking the time and writing this too. In tears (on the inside) because of some validation around problem statement. I am exploring providing this as a pay-once service too, where you get a point-in-time CSV/JSON export and then folks pay to update data. Felt like too much work for the first release so didn't get to it.

As for the original concern though, here's some thoughts: You may just use it to flag (not act) in an async way. This way, you can just alert/monitor and decide later whether or not to take any actions while keeping the flow non-blocking. Another approach would be to run it against existing handles to see what opportunities exist (ex: premium usernames, impersonators etc.).

BUT, thanks again for the input. I'll definitely make this happen!

[tommy_axle]

I see a service like this as being in the ip lookup API category (like ipinfo.io) but I wanted to mention that for this (and IP lookup, captcha etc) I would expect that if the service is down then you allow the registrations then review later, and not simply prevent all registrations.

[choraria]

Interesting. I think you're right (on the API category this falls under). Also love the approach on keeping this API async. Makes so much more sense that way.