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.
toml
[dependencies]
swot="0.1.0"
rust
use swot::{is_academic, get_school_names}
rust
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
rust
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
```rust getschoolnames("abadojack@students.uonbi.ac.ke")
getschoolnames("http://www.stanford.edu")
```
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.
Hopefully, you'll be surprised by some of this:
| Domain | Academic? | Comments |
|--------|-----------|----------|
|stanford.edu|:heavycheckmark:|OK, this was an easy one so you could get at least one right|
|america.edu|:heavymultiplicationx:| Prior to October 29th 2001, anyone could register a .edu domain name (details) |
|duep.edu|:heavycheckmark:| Alfred Nobel University is a Ukranian University in the Ukraine i.e. not in the USA :us: |
|gla.ac.uk|:heavycheckmark:|Glasgow University in Scotland|
|unizar.es|:heavycheckmark:|The University of Zaragoza in Spain|
|usask.ca|:heavycheckmark:|The University of Saskatchewan in Canada|
|hil.no|:heavycheckmark:|Lillehammer University College in Norway|
|unze.ba|:heavycheckmark:|University of Zenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina|
|fu-berlin.de|:heavycheckmark:|Free University of Berlin in Germany|
|ecla.de|:heavycheckmark:|ECLA of Bard is a state recognized liberal arts university in Berlin, Germany |
|bvb.de|:heavymultiplicationx:|It's a soccer team from Germany|
|lsmu.com|:heavycheckmark:| Lugansk State Medical University in the Ukraine |
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 :poop: part of someone's job.