

Man living off Groupons for one year breaks a New York start-up’s website - ticky
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/03/21/stuntmans-zest-for-groupons-breaks-a-new-york-start-ups-website/

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noahlt
This was really hard for me to understand, so I'll post my summary in hopes
that it helps someone else:

CityPockets is a website that helps you organize your coupons and vouchers.
You import your coupons and CityPockets will plot the deals on a map and
display their expiration date. This should make you more efficient with your
coupons.

Josh Stevens is "The Groupawn", a Groupon customer trying to live off of
Groupons for an entire year. What this means is that he has no cash, but a
year's supply of vouchers from Groupon, provided to him for free as a sort of
publicity stunt.

Josh Stevens broke the CityPockets website by trying to import thousands of
Groupon vouchers onto CityPockets, a site whose average load is nine vouchers
per user.

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pavel_lishin
> “At first, we suspected that it was a scam, until we Googled the guy’s
> name.”

What does this even mean? "This guy sure is trying to import a lot of data.
Clearly he's trying to scam us."

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reinhardt
What's strange about it ? Any unusual behavior can be suspect. Also
"suspected" implies possibility, pretty much the opposite of "clearly".

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cherylyeoh
Agreed. We were just surprised, since our highest user at that point only had
85 vouchers (It's 149 now), then this guy comes around with thousands. We
thought it was a fake account, but it turned out to be a real user.

~~~
pavel_lishin
While I understand that it's suspicious - as in, out of the norm - but what
kind of a scam would it have been?

~~~
ticky
LOL - "scam" is probably the wrong word to use. More like a "prank" or some
sort of DOS.

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bingaman
I wouldn't brag about a simple import breaking your site.

~~~
cherylyeoh
We just found it intriguing because our system wasn't optimized or configured
to show thousands of vouchers for a single person (imagine thousands of pins
on a map or how long it'd take to load a page). Never thought anyone would
have so many vouchers! But we've managed to fix that.

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cherylyeoh
Josh is awesome! He has almost 3000 vouchers from across the US and loves that
our map function maps it all out for him, categorizes it and sorts by
expiration. ~Cheryl Yeoh (Founder of CityPockets)

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ffumarola
What about the import caused the site to crash?

Is it a repeatable problem?

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asnyder
It's probably related to Google Maps and their geo-code limitations. You can
only query about 2500 in a 24hr period, and even then you can't do bursts
without being blocked for a 24hr period. What you should do is query in
intervals, store the resulting geo-code information in your database, then use
that information rather constantly query Google's geo-coding services.

I'm not privy to any information, but this is likely what happens as we had to
advise some of our users that were having a similar issue with Google Maps.

~~~
ffumarola
Good info, thanks for the thorough response.

