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https://github.com/leereilly/swot

:school: Identify email addresses or domains names that belong to colleges or universities. Help automate the process of approving or rejecting academic discounts.
https://github.com/leereilly/swot

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:school: Identify email addresses or domains names that belong to colleges or universities. Help automate the process of approving or rejecting academic discounts.

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README 

        
# Swot :apple:



[![Build Status](https://api.travis-ci.org/leereilly/swot.svg)](https://travis-ci.org/leereilly/swot) [![Gem Version](https://badge.fury.io/rb/swot.svg)](http://badge.fury.io/rb/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



Swot is a Ruby gem, so you'll need a little Ruby-fu to get it working. Simply



`gem install swot`



Or add this to your `Gemfile` before doing a `bundle install`:



`gem 'swot'`



## Requirements



- Ruby >= 2.0



### Usage



#### Verify Email Addresses



```ruby

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'           # true

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'           # true

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'  # true

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'                   # true

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'                 # true

Swot::is_academic? '[email protected]'               # false

```



#### Verify Domain Names



```ruby

Swot::is_academic? 'harvard.edu'              # true

Swot::is_academic? 'www.harvard.edu'          # true

Swot::is_academic? 'http://www.harvard.edu'   # true

Swot::is_academic? 'http://www.github.com'    # false

Swot::is_academic? 'http://www.rangers.co.uk' # false

```



#### Find School Names



```ruby

Swot::school_name '[email protected]'

# => "University of Strathclyde"



Swot::school_name 'http://www.stanford.edu'

# => "Stanford University"

```



### Contributing to Swot



Contributions welcome! Please see the [contribution guidelines](CONTRIBUTING.md) for details on how to add, update, or delete schools. Code contributions and ports to different languages welcome too.



**Thanks** to the following people for their contributions:

@blutack, @captn3m0, @chrishunt, @johndbritton, @johnotander, @pborreli, @rcurtis, @vikhyat,.



**Special thanks** to @weppos for the [public_suffix](https://github.com/weppos/publicsuffix-ruby) gem :metal:



### 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 `[email protected]` 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](http://www.fatwallet.com) or [SlickDeals](http://www.slickdeals.net), 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.



### What is a swot?



According to [UrbanDictionary](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swot) :blue_book:



> A word used by morons to insult a person of superior academic abilities.



or



> [verb] To Swot; Revision undertaken preceding an examination.



or



> [backronym] Stupid Waste of Time



### Pop Quiz Answers



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



| Domain | Academic? | Comments |

|--------|-----------|----------|

|`stanford.edu`|:heavy_check_mark:|OK, this was an easy one so you could get at least *one* right|

|`america.edu`|:heavy_multiplication_x:| Prior to October 29th 2001, anyone could register a `.edu` domain name ([details](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu#Grandfathered_uses)) |

|`duep.edu`|:heavy_check_mark:| Alfred Nobel University is a *Ukranian* University *in the Ukraine* i.e. not in the USA :us: |

|`gla.ac.uk`|:heavy_check_mark:|Glasgow University in Scotland|

|`unizar.es`|:heavy_check_mark:|The University of Zaragoza in Spain|

|`usask.ca`|:heavy_check_mark:|The University of Saskatchewan in Canada|

|`hil.no`|:heavy_check_mark:|Lillehammer University College in Norway|

|`unze.ba`|:heavy_check_mark:|University of Zenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina|

|`fu-berlin.de`|:heavy_check_mark:|Free University of Berlin in Germany|

|`ecla.de`|:heavy_check_mark:|ECLA of Bard is a state recognized liberal arts university in Berlin, Germany |

|`bvb.de`|:heavy_multiplication_x:|It's a soccer team from Germany|

|`lsmu.com`|:heavy_check_mark:| 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.



### See Also



* [gman](https://github.com/benbalter/gman) - like swot, but for government emails

* [swotphp](https://github.com/mdwheele/swotphp) - PHP port of Swot

* [swot-js](https://github.com/theotow/swot-js) - JS port of Swot

* [swot-simple](https://github.com/mapbox/swot-simple) - JS port of Swot

* [swot-clj](https://github.com/ipavl/swot-clj) - Clojure port of Swot

* [swot](https://github.com/abadojack/swot) - Go port of Swot