Once and for good: Discontinuing verify
On Dec 16, 2023 I wrote that I was discontinuing my verification service verify.nezto.re as I no longer had any interest in the platform.
In response Conmander kindly took over the API and ran it successfully for several more years. However it's time has once again come and the API is now permanently unavailable.
You can view an excerpt of the original blog post below, explaining the rationale for why I did this. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
The linked bot, Polaris, was shutdown on the 1st March 2022. It has now come time for the verification service to face the same fate.
The reason, this time, is simpler. The service is from a bygone era where verification was hard. Roblox now supports OpenCloud, and you can implement easy authentication and identification of users through OAuth2.
Using OAuth2 is a more complete, secure solution that means users interact directly with Roblox and have more privacy control.
Aquarius continues to service 1.5m requests per week - mostly to the reverse endpoints. Of those, 97.6% give a 404 result. The database has 1.6m links, so the vast majority of requests are unsuccessful. I have no doubt that this is because the verification system is archaic, and the service has not been updated for some time.
Regrettably there is no drop-in replacement that I am aware of. Perhaps this is a good thing; Privacy is a fundamental concern with these APIs, and their open nature enables tracking across accounts and identities in a way which is not easy to control.
The "opt out" functionality was added as a retrofit to meet these concerns but I do not think it goes far enough. Privacy should be the default, and any extra querying should be an opt in. Using OAuth as it is intended meets this requirement. Grants are user and client specific, and grant a specific, limited and user approved number of permissions.
What now?
Use OAuth2 (RFC 6749) and Roblox's OpenCloud API. Certified implementations that do this for you exist.
Embrace the widely adopted solution to this problem now that Roblox have done the same.