Is Sedo down for anyone else

I can't get through to Sedo's homepage, and that's been a problem since last night my time i.e. about 8 hours. I was doing a lot of searches looking for names to buy (perhaps 200-300 searches over a short period) so I wonder if I've triggered some kind of weird "flood checker" that's auto-blocked my IP...

 

Loading fine here.

- Rob

 

Fine for me.

 

Or maybe Joanna's blocked you for grumbling!

 

Fine here too ...

Rgds

 

Ok, thanks. Hopefully Joanna or somebody else from Sedo will see this thread. It's just too much of a coincidence that I got cut off in mid search (I was cut and pasting a long list of terms one at a time into the Sedo search engine to see which were for sale on their platform) and that every other site I tried still loaded fine... It would be nice to have a confirmation that some kind of "blocker" exists, at least.

It's working again now for me, btw - so that's about 11 hours unavailable in all.

 

There is definately a system in place at Sedo to block you if you perform quite a few searches. I've had this happen to me on quite a few occasions, and whilst I've been unable to search on a handful of machines sharing the same IP address, I've been able to switch to a machine using a different IP address and continue searching without problem. Typically the block has been around the 12 hour mark.

 

Crazy really, as I am very much in "buying mode" when I've got a large list of names I'm checking, but my hands are tied. BTW, I've asked several times in the past and the answer's always been the same: Sedo's unable to generate their own list of domains for sale off of a supplied keyword list (which is why I am having to do the checking manually)

 

There's certainly room int he market for a comprehensive .co.uk only sales site. Sedo doesn't seem to cut the mustard.

 

200 and a bit lookups and I'm blocked again. At this rate, it's going to take me a week to go through the list of terms I'd be interested in buying.

Surely the system can be made to distinguish between a bot attack (1000s of hits per minute) and somebody vigorously searching (approx. 1 search per 15-30 seconds)?!

 

I can understand why to an extent Sedo implement a block, however it is unfortunately flawed. Like you say, a search every 15 of so seconds is certainly distinguishable from a search every second, or multiple searches per second.

Perhaps a more sensible block would be based on the number of searches in a given timeframe, whether or not you are logged in (i.e. an actual Sedo user), the number of domains you currently have listed on Sedo and whether or not you are an active buyer.

The biggest issue I found with the block is not only does it not tell you that you are blocked, the block applies to the entire Sedo site (they may have fixed this by now), which is a bit of an issue when you are actually in the process of either selling a domain name or are in the process of attempting to buy one.

It certainly needs a rethink imho.

As for Sedo not being able to generate a list for you, that's not based on some technical restriction as it would be quite easy for them to run a search against their database using your keywords. If they genuinally don't have a tool to allow them to do that, then it wouldn't be partically time consuming or difficult for them to create one so that they could offer to do it for genuine buyers. At the end of the day they're there to sell domains and if a user like yourself is looking to aquire a number of names then they should certainly be receptive to that.

 

NOTE: I completed my list scanning by using various free uk proxy services. I don't want to name them here, in case Sedo goes after the proxies as well and IP-bans them, but suffice to say that I Googled "UK proxy" and had a poke around the first couple of pages of results until I found a useful selection of sites.

 

I think the norm for any kind of rate limiting would be to block anything that is extremely fast, anything that is suspicious should simply be presented with a captcha every 15 minutes or something.