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