3rd parties scraping profiles from mountain project

I was just thinking- what prevents someone from downloading all mp profiles from the site? 

The zero financial benefit.

Listen to "Breach" on whatever platform you use to listen to podcasts. The stuff that you think of as unimportant can get hackers into your bank accounts. your voter registry.... literally anything if they are determined enough. A couple hundred million dead  accounts on yahoo literally may have subverted democracy in the US as we know it.

mpech wrote: I was just thinking- what prevents someone from downloading all mp profiles from the site? 

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "downloading"?  What sort of information would the individual be gathering?

Andrew Tegley wrote:

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "downloading"?  What sort of information would the individual be gathering?

Andrew- in your case- Name, location,profile picture, age, associated posts.

As others in the thread noted, it is a less rich dataset than, say, Facebook or LinkedIn, so the desire to scrape the data may be lower. It just seems weird that anyone that creates an MP account can access all other account profiles. 

I just learned the word, "doxing." I think it applies to this concern the OP raises.

 I can see your point. My wife never posts pictures of vacations on Facebook until we return home. She worries someone could see you’re away and break in your house. Someone could create an account, check what people are ticking off and if it’s outta town drive by yo house.

 I’m always amazed at how easy it is to find out people’s information online.

you know.. you don't have to be signed into, or even a member of MP... to view someone's complete "profile"  (and it's not like either of these things are even a major hurdle for any determined AI)
therefore the data is already indexed by Google and every other internet spider.
it's already out there.  welcome to the internet.

It's so surprising that anyone still uses their full real names. More surprising that some throw tantrums about people others not using the names on their social security card. Not surprising at all that these two groups heavily overlap and are mostly older people.

It's probably already been sold....... ;)

@Jack (if that's your real name) not using your real name makes it easy to troll but is irrelevant in the data scheme. They know who you are.... ;)

John Barritt wrote: It's probably already been sold....... ;)

@Jack (if that's your real name) not using your real name makes it easy to troll but is irrelevant in the data scheme. They know who you are.... ;)

this is true!

it's not just facebook who develops "shadow profiles" on everyone they can find.

import requests
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4)
links = re.findall(r'https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/\d{9}.*(?=")',
                   requests.get('https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/latest').text)
userList = {}
for link in links:
    _html = requests.get(link)
    users = re.findall(r'https://www.mountainproject.com/user/\d{8,11}.*(?=">)', _html.text)
    for user in users:
        if user not in userList:
            soupSmall = BeautifulSoup( requests.get(user).text, "html.parser" )
            _raw = soupSmall.find("div", { "class" : "col-xs-12 text-xs-center" }).text
            _raw = re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9 ]+', '', _raw)
            raw = re.sub('\W+', ' ', _raw)
            userList[user] = raw
pp.pprint(userList)