111–120 of 195 posts
Wayback machine would've saved me there, had I done my due diligence!
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
The post talks a bit about this: In a perfect world, when your legitimately good content isn’t being surfaced by Google, it’s a failure on their part, and their problem to solve, not yours. In practice, it is your problem and you have to do a bunch of work to help them see that their current assessment of your domain name is no longer accurate. You're right, the fault lies with the search engines, but in practice it…
Another "haunted domain" check is by trying to post about it on social media. I ran into this with my current project's domain name. After building an MVP and trying to test the social sharing functionality, I found that Facebook was blocking the domain outright. Turns out there was some spamming from it years ago. Getting it unblocked was extra fun, as the page to request manual review was itself broken! Thankfully…
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
I really disagree with pulling the power dynamic angle into focus here. Injustice can also be carried out by the "little man", sometimes even at scale, and is every bit as awful to remedy if not even more so. The issue is with the issue: people/systems (big and small) blacklisting an ownable identifier pointing to some ownable content without any care for the lifecycle of either. Painting this with a social brush is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post talks a bit about this: In a perfect world, when your legitimately good content isn’t being surfaced by Google, it’s a failure on their part, and their problem to solve, not yours. In practice, it is your problem and you have to do a bunch of work to help them see that their current assessment of your domain name is no longer accurate. You're right, the fault lies with the search engines, but in practice it…
We should avoid words and concepts which places the blame unfairly on mostly powerless individuals.
Something terrible happened here in the past.
The intangible spirts from this terrible event remain.
The new owner discovers his pictures scream at him and his closet constantly fills up with blood.
The fault, ultimately, belongs with the one who did the terrible deed.
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
So, haunted then?
Calling a domain “haunted” is an awful, terrible way to frame it. It places all the badness of the domain on the domain itself , as if the domain name had something with it which could be removed or fixed by the domain owner. Instead, what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution…
I really disagree with pulling the power dynamic angle into focus here. Injustice can also be carried out by the "little man", sometimes even at scale, and is every bit as awful to remedy if not even more so. The issue is with the issue: people/systems (big and small) blacklisting an ownable identifier pointing to some ownable content without any care for the lifecycle of either. Painting this with a social brush is…
Does the lifecycle matter much, though?
Kind of like a carfax report. Tells you whether a vehicle you’re buying has been in an accident before (if it has, the value goes down because maybe there’s some latent issue that isn’t obvious at the time of purchase)
It would be nice if ICANN had some equivalent of a carfax for domains, perhaps even with a requirement that registrars expose at time of purchase whether a domain has been misused in the past (and who the prior owners were, or at the very minimum what the historical DNS records were).
Basically you want to avoid buying a “lemon” domain by accident.
I place zero fault/blame on “powerful entities” maintaining lists of domains used for spam/scams. How else will we protect grandma?