A web site, you login with google oauth, and after that send invitations to all of your contacts. Including that email accounts that are reserved for monitoring and alert systems. See how my college receive and sms from and alert system and asking to ack the alert "you have and invitation from reference.me" was fun, but not serious.
So for your good. Don't even enter this spammers site.
And if you do, remember to revoke access from your oauth provider.
That's full access you're granting there - not just oAuth login. It's pretty hard to spot that though. Not sure if I would have.
So mixtent (the guys behind reference.me) or some fans decided to all flag you? Or was it admin action?
For whatever reason, all traces of stories about startups behaving badly have a tendency to disappear from HN these days. As do stories about the dissapearance itself. Really disappointing to someone who likes the HN community.
What the hell was their plan here? Unless this was some project to show people not to trust these types of sites with oauth permissions then it was a catastrophic failure wasn't it?
I'd never heard of them and now all I've heard, from multiple people, is to never sign in to their site because they're horrible spammers. The tone has, 100% percent of the time, been one where they wanted to at least spit in someone from reference.me's face, if not punch them.
Unless they've figured out a way to monetize user hatred ...
Is there anything in place for this kind of abuse? Has anyone reported anything like this before and can comment on the efficacy of the complaint?