

Ask HN: How did Facebook initially limit users to universities? - bsbechtel

Hi all, I'm wondering, programatically, how Facebook initially limited people joining their site to those at specific universities (i.e., @harvard.edu).<p>Was it as simple as cross referencing the user's email domain to a list stored on their servers of approved schools and then confirming the account through email? I feel like there should be a more robust solution, but I'm not sure what it could be.
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bandy
Limited to specific domains (::Universities), I'm not sure of, but before they
opened it to public registrations, the requirement was that you had to have a
.edu e-mail address.

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antsam
You had to have an e-mail address from a University at the time. There
probably isn't anything more robust for checking if you're enrolled at a
certain University than having to click a link sent to your University e-mail.

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veermishra0803
I am not an expert, but as i can see, when they first started from Harvard in
2004, they restricted the access to only @harvard,edu address (must have had
some sort of Java script validation to check and allow only that domain)and
later when they expanded to diff universities the same validations must have
been modified.

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andyhmltn
I would expect a bit more than JS validation as that's only client slide.

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dglassan
you already answered your own question. They limited signups to only people
with @hardvard.edu addresses. When they expanded they just added more schools
to that list of approved addresses

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craig552uk
It's not especially robust, but restricting access to .edu email addresses
helped to enforce the image of exclusivity, which only made the possession of
an account more desirable.

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staunch
An easy solution today would be to just restrict people based on what school
they have in their FB profile ;-)

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mattie314
In the UK I think they just required an email ending .ac.uk

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pasbesoin
Back at that time, or a bit earlier, many commercial software products offered
"academic" licenses that were (also) sold by third parties. And in the earlier
cases of this, often "validation" of eligibility consisted of demonstrating
that one had a .edu email address.

So yes, people really did use email addresses as qualifiers, including for
significant commercial transactions.

(Although some might argue, if you as the licensor weren't willing to setting
for a .edu address as proof, you might as well settle for no-revenue piracy.
_And_ some others would argue that, licensed or pirated, initial uptake was
crucial to driving further sales e.g. when such people landed in jobs where
licenses _were_ purchased -- they'd buy what they or the employees knew and
were proficient with.

 _So_ , regardless of the particular rationale employed, email addresses were
used as "proof".)

