HACKER Q&A
📣 dingosity

Anyone else locked out of zillow.com?


Zillow has this thing where it asks you to hold down your mouse to prove you're a human. Guess they figured it was better than a regular Captcha. But no matter how many times I hold down the mouse button and no matter which browser or device I use, I keep getting the "hold down the mouse to prove you're a human" page. Except for my mobile phone which uses android chrome which just doesn't display anything. The app on my phone is barfing if I'm connected over wi-fi, but works fine over mobile data.

This makes me think Zillow is blocking my IP address. I mean... I could just use Redfin, but Zillow sometimes has a different mix of properties available and I'm always curious what they z-estimate says about my neighborhood.

The hilarious thing is there's no indication they're collecting data about failures, but hopefully they are and if it's happening to a number of people they'll eventually fix it.

I guess my question is... does anyone know anyone over at Zillow? Should I apply for a job there just so I can speak to someone in engineering to see if we could figure out what the problem is?


  👤 dingosity Accepted Answer ✓
Should have mentioned my desktop is a debian 12 intel system running both Firefox and Chrome. Hitting https://zillow.com/ with Lynx is somewhat hilarious -- it just gives you a 403. I wonder if my IP got blacklisted 'cause I kept hitting it with a desktop browser they don't care about (Firefox on Linux.)

👤 dingosity
meh. nevermind. it's back. guess someone pushed out an update they shouldn't have and they eventually reverted it.