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Dear professor, we’re so glad you’re not a bot!

Everybody who runs an online service knows - each registration makes the developers happier. By the end of the day we measure the number of page visits vs. registrations and think how to make the numbers even better.

But yesterday our interest in numbers turned out pretty funny.

Imagine a family (we are a family of software developers but still) at a dinner. She (me) cooks, he (Kir) is fixing a bug and “is already coming, just a sec”. After 5 minutes I decide that a bug can wait, as it’s not the last one, and go to see where my backend half is. And he’s watching in awe as we’re getting flooded with registrations. Email addresses look suspicious. IP check? Same IP for all. Gosh. We’ve got a bot attack. Dinner aside, we must block the IP before it gets worse.

But what if … “students?” say we together. And wow, what a great relief. We’ve got 4 online classes registring, working, editing, moving, copying and pasting busily.

No IP blocking, no captcha on the registration form, no suspicions! But can we ask for a favour? If you’re inviting people and expect a lot of simultaneous registrations from one IP address (=one network), please drop us a note? Something very simple, like “Hey, guys, we’re going to use your tool within [a class], [at work], […] - expect a lot of people coming!” And we’ll reply: “Happy to hear that! Let us know if everything works fine for you - we’ll be happy to help if it doesn’t.”