TylerM – Tyler Menezes

The more observant of you will have noticed that I haven’t logged into StumbleUpon since May of 2008. Most of my friends already know the story of why I don’t use it anymore, but I figured I’d finally write it down.

Thanks to PortableApps, I used to be able to use Firefox at my school, with the StumbleUpon toolbar addon installed. However, sometime in early May they blocked the page StumbleUpon uses to get a new Stumble. Upset, but not discouraged, I set out to create a version of StumbleUpon which ran solely from the web. The protocol is actually really, really simple:

• Test if the username and password exist by sending a POST request to http://www.stumbleupon.com/userexists.php?username=0 with “version”, “username”, and “password”.
• Send a POST request to http://www.stumbleupon.com/recommend.php?username={{user ID}} to get a list of Stumbles. It’s the same parameters as the last one, plus a bunch of extras that I can’t figure out what do and don’t ever seem to change.

The results of my efforts are at http://mobile.stumble.tylerm.info/. Being a reasonable person, I contacted the developer of the Firefox plugin, Geoff Smith, who’s also one of the founders of StumbleUpon, to ask him if it would be okay to use this site. He replied that it was against their terms of use, and for “abuse” reasons he wouldn’t make an exception. I explained that this would be of use for the StumbleUpon community in a followup email, and asked if there was anyone else I could get in contact with or if they might develop one on their own.

Rather than respond to my email, I found myself unable to use StumbleUpon shortly thereafter. I couldn’t login, nor could I reset my password. My account still seems to exist (my profile page is still there) but I could no longer use my account.

Just because I was kind of upset at them for acting this way, I modified my site to make the requests to their servers through a large list of proxies, and made it otherwise indistinguishable from the legitimate toolbar. As far as I know, the site is still operational, though I can hardly check.

Sure, I could probably have created a new StumbleUpon account, but that’s aside from the point - if they don’t want me as a member, I’m fine with using Digg and Reddit instead. I’d rather do that than support a company which would treat its members like that - it’s not as if I wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, or was looking to spam the service, I was creating a legitimate tool for the community.

So, in short, I was banned because I asked for permission to use a legitimate tool rather than just using it. I’m fine with that, because I’d rather not support people who resort to drastic actions rather than communications, anyways. But that site should still work, should anyone else want to use it.