Swot

If you have a product or service and offer academic discounts, there's a good chance there's some manual component to the approval process. Perhaps .edu email addresses are automatically approved because, for the most part at least, they're associated with American post-secondary educational institutions. Perhaps .ac.uk email addresses are automatically approved because they're guaranteed to belong to British universities and colleges. Unfortunately, not every country has an education-specific TLD (Top Level Domain) and plenty of schools use .com or .net.

Swot is a community-driven or crowdsourced library for verifying that domain names and email addresses are tied to a legitimate university of college - more specifically, an academic institution providing higher education in tertiary, quaternary or any other kind of post-secondary education in any country in the world.

Pop quiz: Which of the following domain names should be eligible for an academic discount? stanford.edu, america.edu, duep.edu, gla.ac.uk, unizar.es, usask.ca, hil.no, unze.ba, fu-berlin.de, ecla.de, bvb.de, lsmu.com. Answers at the foot of the page.

Installation

[dependencies]
swot="0.1.0"

Usage

use swot::{is_academic, get_school_names}

Verify Email Addresses

is_academic("abadojack@students.uonbi.ac.ke")	//true
is_academic("pedro@ugr.es")				        //true
is_academic("abadojack@leerilly.net")		    //false
is_academic("abadojack@gmail.com")			    //false

Verify Domain Names

is_academic("harvard.edu")              //true
is_academic("www.harvard.edu")          //true
is_academic("http://www.harvard.edu")   //true
is_academic("http://www.github.com")    //false
is_academic("http://www.rangers.co.uk") //false

Find School Names

get_school_names("abadojack@students.uonbi.ac.ke")
# => "University of Nairobi"

get_school_names("http://www.stanford.edu")
# => "Stanford University"

Known Issues

• You can search by email and domain names only. You cannot search by IP.
• You don't know if the email address belongs to a student, faculty, staff member, alumni, or a contractor.
• There may be a few false positives, missing institutions... maybe even a couple of typos. Contributions welcome!

Please note: just because someone has verified that they own lreilly@stanford.edu does not mean that they're a student. They could be faculty, staff, alumnni, or maybe even an external contractor. If you're suddenly getting a lot of traffic from websites like FatWallet or SlickDeals, you might want to find out why. If you're suddenly getting a lot of requests from a particular school, you should look into that too. It may be good business, word of mouth, or someone may have found a loophole. Swot gives you a high confidence level - not a guarantee. I recommend putting some controls in place or at least monitor how it's doing from time to time.

Pop Quiz Answers

Hopefully, you'll be surprised by some of this:

If you verified this by visiting all of the websites, how long did it take you? Did you have fun? Imagine you had to do this 10 - 100 times every day. Now you know a little something about the inspiration for Swot. Swot can verify them all in a fraction of a second and remove a 💩 part of someone's job.

See Also

• swot - Swot in Ruby (Original swot. Inspired the rest of of the swot ports including this.)
• gman - like swot, but for government emails
• swotphp - PHP port of Swot
• swot-js - JS port of Swot
• swot-simple - JS port of Swot
• swot-clj - Clojure port of Swot