After having the pleasure of having a spammer get one of our IP's blacklisted last week I am considering starting a service for hosting companies to try to help prevent problem clients from bouncing from host to host.

I am thinking of a database where hosts could check to see if someone has a history as well as add people to warn other hosts.

There are a couple things I am not sure of and would like some opinions please.

1. Do you think it would be useful?

2. What information could be listed legally?

I was thinking domain name, names used to order, etc. but I am in no hurry to get sued.

Any opinions greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Do a search around, there is already such a database being run by one host. I forget who now. I emailed asking for access to the database but unfortunately, I have not heard back.

Someone will no doubt post the link to what I am talking about :p

One way to prevent lamers buying hosting, is too ask for an address. Make it required. Often this puts off potentiol trouble makers.

Do you think it would be useful? Probably, but it opens the door for abuse and even vigilantes.
What information could be listed legally? In most cases, very little if any. If you have any sort of a privacy statement on your site, you would be violating your own policy. Could you get sued? Absolutely. Could you lose? Yes. Would you get sued? Maybe not. Would you get threatened with suits? Definitely.

I agree with James. All our registrations are processed manually, as well as the system doesn't allow you to get as far as actually sending it unless you fill out all the information as required for the domain registration. Then when we go through the new orders, we can filter out ones that look a bit fishy (had one guy enter his address as the white house once).

Here are a couple links to possibly check out:

WWW-Hosting.net Stop Fraud (http://www-hosting.net/denied.html)
CombatFraud.org (http://www.combatfraud.org/forum/index.php)

And here's a very long WHT thread to read through:

CC Fraud > Drastic Action (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=25585&perpage=15&pagenumber=1)

HTH
yjack

Thanks everyone. We do require an address, phone numbers, etc. Our merchant account provides address verification, and a cvv check plus we go through each one by hand.

The problem I was referring to was clients that provide good information but then become a problem. The spammer we had last week matched in every check we did.

I guess we will just have to be satisfied that we are preventing as many problems as we can.


Thanks