Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability

http://www.usernique.com

by trevorah • 13 years ago

31 42 13 years ago

trevorah13• 13 years ago

Any feedback would be really cool...

conroy2• 13 years ago

You should add more services! I wrote http://handlehelp.com which checks for username availability across multiple sites. It's open source[1], so you can use some of my checks if you'd like.

[1] https://github.com/kyleconroy/handlehelp

trevorah13• 13 years ago

Good idea, thanks!

citricsquid• 13 years ago

Regarding the reddit check, a username can be unavailable for registration even if there is no profile, after an account is deleted the username is reserved forever. Not sure if there is any way to check if a username is actually available with out trying to register it. For example "citricsquid" is unavailable on reddit but your service reports it is available.

jschuur4• 13 years ago

Should look up the domain name too.

And what's the point in showing the ones that are taken?

jschuur4• 13 years ago

Wow, that was fast. I love that you're literally rolling out new features while I refresh this thread. Kudos!

nsp4• 13 years ago

Could you include domain names (.com, maybe .io/.ly) and maybe Facebook url? If you had those this could be great for finding pronounceable names.

It's be great if you could set it so that it would just keep trying until it found one that was available on all services, but I can see that adding a ton of overhead, so I can see why you haven't done that yet.

trevorah13• 13 years ago

I've just added the .io and i'll add .com in a bit. Adding in the loop might be a bit much if you're not bothered about certain services - e.g constantly updating the page just because a twitter name cant be found.

josephpmay• 13 years ago

You should include some form of timeouting. I purposely have Reddit blocked on my computer, and the page wouldn't finish loading because of that.

MasterScrat• 13 years ago

Is there a way to have the checks performed for a given username? That would seem a lot more useful to me...

duvet• 13 years ago

you should be clearer about what the site does without ruining the simplicity. I was shown the site and didn't notice the title, so it caught me off guard. it appeared to be someone's about page rather than a generator.

ponyous• 13 years ago

It seems like every username starts with vowel.

trevorah13• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's very basic. If you check out the src, you can see that it is vowel, consonant, vowel... Basic, but it kinda works.

Avalaxy• 13 years ago

I love, it has some great user name suggestions. It would be great if it would check some more sites.

bdc• 13 years ago

What are you using to determine whether *.io domains are "free" vs "taken"? It seems to be incorrect.

  http://www.usernique.com/io/x
  -- "free"

  http://www.nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=x.io
  -- The domain is unavailable for use.

trevorah13• 13 years ago

just checking the return code on a GET request. src is on github if you're curious. You're right though, looks like the domain lookups need a bit of work.

rajivm• 13 years ago

You should do a "whois" lookup for the domain. The return code for a 'get' request on the domain has no bearing on its availability -- many parked domains do not even have DNS configured, let alone HTTP.

nwh• 13 years ago

The quickest way I've found is to do a DNS lookup, and if that fails, hit the WHOIS.

jschuur4• 13 years ago

Looks like there's some bugs here. Just claimed 'esi' was available on Twitter and GitHub, but it's not.

cbhl3• 13 years ago

Hmm. Judging from the way the server.js is written, I'd expect he's being rate-limited, and the server returns free whenever the HTTP call doesn't return 200.

Edit: Just to be sure, I threw in a breakpoint on line 18 of generate.js, and set name to my username (cbhl) -- and got a false "free" result for both Twitter and GitHub.

The OP might need to be getting OAuth tokens and using the GitHub/Twitter APIs.

mijustin2• 13 years ago

Here's another one: says "ece" is available. http://d.pr/i/fiRF

alexvr2• 13 years ago

Sweet! I love this name: etabocagi

Sounds like an indigenous tribe or something

alexvr2• 13 years ago

Apparently etune.com is available... cooler than any of my domains, and randomly generated. Nice.

mijustin2• 13 years ago

Nope. etune.com is taken. Some of the "available" results being returned are not correct.

dag11• 13 years ago

I noticed this too. It said "ely.com" is available, which was strange because most (all?) 3-character .com's are registered. And yeah, ely.com is registered.

scrapcode• 13 years ago

Idea is awesome. I like how the usernames are generated in the first place. It doesn't work, however. I've been looking for simple things that I can hack up to help me learn ruby, so I made a little Ruby version using this idea. "UNameGen"

https://github.com/scrapcode/ruby-unamegen

Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability

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