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Never buy a .online domain

0xsid.com

201–210 of 513 posts

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(IAAL but this is not legal advice.) It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact . Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion .

In my opinion, a .online domain is unsafe. 99% of people only visit ".com"s unless they clicked a scam link. Completely blocking the site is overkill, but the browser should warn you about it like it does with non-SSL sites.

thanks for the laugh. Even if you only meant people from the US this is likely not true. What about government websites at .gov? 99% never visit them?

In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#203
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

Google doesn't sell their list to you. They give it to you for free. Using their list costs them money. Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive. Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscr…

> Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive

There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google’s allowed to have an opinion. But that doesn’t mean that the registrar should be suspending the domain immediately in response. These two mechanisms should be decoupled.

Google should not be allowed to make libelous statements without consequences.

How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?

Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.

And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#205
post #7

One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?

> I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now? Google's way of tying real identifies of people to domains, without making it explicit. Basically, your domain will be weirdly treated by a bunch of entities, none the less Google themselves, if you don't add your domain there (or some other Google property). Especially with less common TLDs, like .online, they reall…

Open a fake Google account under your dog's name using a VPN? It doesn't have to be tied to your own every day Goog acct. Any old account will do.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#206

Why was the domain blacklisted though? What can we do to prevent blacklisting in the first place?

That’s my question. I’ve launched many fresh websites that have not been marked as unsafe by Google. If they were habitually doing this, there would be far more reports of it. I suspect there is something the author is not telling us.

Even if the false-positive rate is very small (e.g. 0.01%), you probably won't be affected, but more than a hundred thousand of websites would be and that would still be an issue. I have no idea how big is the false-positive rate.

There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33526893

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675015

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#208
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to cover all the bases. The site has one outgoing link to the App Store and 3 screenshots.

That sounds like a competitor of yours manually submitting your site to Google for “impersonating” them or something. Anyone can submit URLs to Google to suggest it be blocked: https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ Perhaps some overworked underpaid analyst had a lapse of judgement. I’m sorry that this happens to you.

wait, this actually makes things sound even worse because anyone who might not like your product can add it to google and google can sometimes be none the wiser and then add it to phishing link which could then lead to their domains (ie. any TLD's hosted by radix.website) being lost in void essentially unless you have verified the domain in google analytics and even then I would consider this whole situation to be so messy.

At this point, NEVER buy any radix.website TLD domains.

I am seeing pinggy had the same issue with their .online domain and this actually definitely caused hurt to their business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410 (I saw this post from their comment in here referencing it)

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#209

Side note: My empirical experience is that vanity domains are disliked by some enterprise security systems. I have a friend who owns a .homes domain which ended up being blocked by quad9 as well as the enterprise security system of a friend's work for ~half a year. The block cleared by itself. I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" fe…

Even (uncommon) country TLD's too. I own a .vg domain which is a perfect match with the initials of my last name. My mails end up in spam quite often too, despite having set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and all that stuff correctly. It's just not common so some security systems block it.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#210
post #198

The logic doesn't automatically extend to other TLDs unless they too are owned by the same firm. Alternative TLDs are often preferable because they're so much cheaper than wasting money on a .com, etc.

Most alternative tlds are more expensive than .com after first year teaser rates expire though

https://tld-list.com/ Try looking at this website with cheapest renewal rate and removing second country TLD (so only Top level)

In my opinion, .de , .ovh , .uk or personally my country's .in (yes OVH has their own TLD that you can use)

.de is one of the more interesting domains to me personally even though I am not german.

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