I went to check a cert # and found this change had been made. Apparently you now have to enter the grade as well as the cert # or it won't search. No idea why making it more complicated to verify a cert is in anyway seen as an improvement. https://www.ngccoin.com/certlookup/
It's an improvement (to NGC) because it makes it more difficult to scrape the database. It takes roughly 10x the number of probes per cert, which gives their rate limiting logic more chances to stop you.
If making the database more difficult to search is NGC's grand contribution or "solution", it's akin to placing a tiny used bandaid on a raging cancer. It's not like there are no other ways around this.
It seems a bit more complicated to me. I couldn't search a coin without inputting the grade. I guess that means the certification number alone is useless?
Not useless, per se, but certainly more complex. If I were to script it, I would want to query in the most logical order, and to do that I'd need the coin's year. For a modern semi-NCLT I'd script it as 69, 70, 68, 67, 66... For a classic coin, probably 64, 63, 65, 62, 61, 66, 58, 55, ... (I'd have to pick a few hundred rows from the various pop charts, combine them and see where details falls in the frequency distribution) They already rate limit queries, so it becomes much more likely I'll hit that and cause the IP address to be blocked. They've already blocked TOR exit nodes (and there aren't enough of them), but there's probably ways around that, at least in part. I just don't care enough to enter the arms race...
