Validation: Beyond email addresses/Phone numbers

Question

Several years ago I developed a website for a wholesale company that wanted to keep its online catalog (and wholesale pricing) private. Short of manually reviewing each submitted application, I was really stuck on how to accurately accomplish this.

This has also come up in other web projects requiring registration to access certain "slightly secret" information - including members of the press, and dealers. With most of these applications receiving very little in terms of actual submissions, it was easy to dismiss the task of automatically validating the form as impossible (or too much effort).

Lately however, there has been a very large increase in registrations, and it would make sense to automate this process if at all possible.

The site is developed in PHP, and I have tried the following:

• Scraping Dunn and Bradstreet against business phone
• Scrapping Yellow pages against phone/address
• Basic Regex

The regex is just standard, any-user validation. The scraping was unreliable (and questionably following the terms & conditions)

How do other developers deal with the issue of business/press validation, and how do they justify this to their clients?

Thanks loads

Answer 1

Once you get past the human vs. bot screening, you're looking for some way of distinguishing the merely curious non-target visitor (say, the proverbial 14-year old kid) from those you want to let in. As the other commenters say, there's no universal Turing machine way to identify, let alone evaluate, a purported reporter or business person who might be interested in your site.

One thing you might consider is posing the question "please briefly describe your interest in [the site] and the specific aspects of our products or services that interest you." Then develop some experience based heuristics for automated screening. First, run it through a spam filter, next score for keywords, etc.