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Just built Zync — a privacy-first tool to instantly share code, links, or notes (no login)
(zyncshare.vercel.app)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Programming
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It says that once the content is accessed, it vanishes. So, you can have a max 2 day expiration length, but as soon as someone follows the link, it's gone? It's not a bad idea, but it is prone to abuse. I could write a scraper app that would give me all of the active URLs and in doing so would delete any message attached to them. I personally wouldn't, because it doesn't serve much purpose, but if there were a malicious agent, it wouldn't take much to wreak havoc. It wouldn't even be a DDOS level attack, just a simple scraper using minimal resources.
Truly, though, I do like it. I just think that the automatic removal might be a risky feature.
Automatically adding a generatored password to each share site could fix this. Without the password the page cant be accessed and thus wont be deleted.
For sharing, the password could be embedded in the URL as a fragment/query param.
Even a captcha would work. You wouldn't have to have your users create a one time use password, you can just have a set of 5 random numbers that someone has to type in in order to access the data.
Do you think adding a basic captcha would actually stop these kinds of abuse attacks, or is there a better way? I think it will stop bots but I don't really know about preventing users. I’m still testing ideas like optional PINs, like the other comments said , but I’m not sure which one gives the best balance of security and ease for users. Would love your thoughts!
It will stop the lazy, which is 99% of the battle. If you want some form of security, then either a user generated pin or a captcha will do the trick to keep bots away. If you want to avoid both of those, then a longer url will also work. 12 characters will prevent attacks from getting anything but lucky.
Yeah! I just wanted to build the simplest UX for users and just added a 6-character access key for every Zync, plus basic rate limiting to stop mass scraping. It’s invisible to users but blocks most common abuse. Will keep improving it based on all your feedback — appreciate it a lot.