HN

Comments (228)

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  AshamedCaptain
  > The domain ... has been suspended due to its blacklisting on Google Safe BrowsingEt voilà ... ! this is precisely the slippery slope I warned about a decade ago. The indirect censorship becomes direct censorship, defeating all the arguments about the morality of such a list. And:> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.Yet more monopolistic power to Google.
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  NikolaNovak
  Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).
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  iamnothere
  The registrar relying on Google Safe Browsing as a “trigger” for suspension is the most horrifying thing I’ve seen in a while. This basically makes the entire TLD unviable for serious use.
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  merek
  The TLD owner in this case was Radix, which also owns.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .websitehttps://radix.website/
• pverheggen
  I wonder if Radix has unknowingly created a negative feedback loop here. From Google's perspective, the DNS records disappear shortly after being flagged by Safe Browsing, which their heuristics may interpret as scammy behavior.
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  petterroea
  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" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.
• iryndin
  A list of all registered (3,231,464 domain so far) .online domains is here: https://allzonefiles.io/zone/online
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  pil0u
  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?
• ghoshbishakh
  We posted this warning on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410We struggled a lot when we opted for the .online domain for https://pinggy.io urls
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  yanis_t
  I still remember how Google banned my entire account without providing a reason for a small Android app (more than 12 years ago). To this day I have no idea why, it was absolutely green-area fit tracker or something. There was absolutely no way to know the reason or unblock my account. Turned me away from Android development forever.
• iotku
  Had a similar experience with the .win TLD which I was using for a vanity domain name a couple of years ago.Was just hosting a Jellyfin server for myself (effectively just a login page) and it got flagged by GSB and that suspended the domain shortly after.Tried claiming it with Google's Search Console before it got completely taken down and that didn't help, emailed Namecheap and they just said that it was suspended and there was nothing they could (were willing to) do.If you can't make enough noise to get noticed in such a case you're just out of luck.
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  shit_game
  > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?
• trey-jones
  I'm sorry that the author got bitten by this. But .com purism is funny to me. I only buy GTLDs for personal projects, and I've never had a problem before. But then, I've never bought .online.
• __MatrixMan__
  We need to rethink the web so that fewer third parties are involved in things that seem on the surface to be an A-B conversation. To say nothing of the trustworthiness of those parties, having them involved at all is needlessly brittle.
• MattSayar
  Took me a minute to realize Sid isn't associated with 0xide.computer. Clever domain name!Getting Google to index my personal site has been a pain. Every other search engine works fine, but ever since I switched the images on my site to .webp (a format created by Google!), my site's content just doesn't get indexed anymore. I've given up since web search traffic matters less and less these days with LLMs, and it only really bothers me when I'm trying to search for my own articles.
• zadikian
  But was this because it's .online? I got one and it was fine.The only issue was the usual trap with all Namecheap domains: They tell you it's all set, and it works, until they randomly email you a week later asking for email verification. If you don't do that promptly, they suspend your domain until you trigger a resend. Which is easy to fix but also strange.
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  eappleby
  Unfortunate story. It wasn't clear to me that the .online TLD led to Google blacklisting the site. Why did you think that was connected?
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  blenderob
  Why was the domain blacklisted though? What can we do to prevent blacklisting in the first place?
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  palad1n
  Are there any other TLDs that are of this ilk or are we saying nothing but .com will ever do? Or .org, perhaps?
• _el1s7
  This is one of the pains of centralization. And honestly, it could happen with any TLD.
• anon
  undefined
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  siliconunit
  tried to roll my own email server on a .xyz domain...basically a big no go, couple of emails went through, then nothing, just a black hole. Thanks corpos and the safety theatre.
• dzonga
  why not just buy a .co.xx (country) or simply .com / .netand if hectic maybe .io
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  OutOfHere
  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.
• Tepix
  I blame both the registry and Google.If you were a lawyer, you could have fun with this.Btw, perhaps unrelatedly, we had a domain marked as unsafe by Google as well for no particular reason.
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  ocdtrekkie
  A great reminder even if you aren't a Google customer, Google's love of banning people with no notice or recourse will still screw you over.
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  fortran77
  Never use a “free” domain is a better rule. Even if there were no technical or administrative issues, nobody trusts them.
• metalliqaz
  Top of HN. Well, I guess you could say that Radix's strategy to give away domains backfired spectacularly.
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  CodeCompost
  Last year, my registrar wanted €64,99 to extend an online domain which I had created for fun.No thanks.
• drcongo
  Google have way too much power to mess people's lives up. Especially for an organisation with basically zero customer support.
• account42
  > Update: Within 40 minutes of posting this on HN, the site has been removed from Google's Safe Search blacklist. Thank you, unknown Google hero! I've emailed Radix to remove the darn serverHold.I wouldn't party too soon - from my experience getting something removed from Google's libel machine doesn't mean the same process that put it there in the first place is fixed and it you will most likely go through the same thing again and again.> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.This is just another way how Google has inserted themselves as the gatekeeper of the web.
• hyperionultra
  Having .online already 5 years. No problems with email or website. Don’t understand that blog post. More problems can be with .xyz
• basilikum
  This sounds like something ICANN should prevent. Is this not against ICANN rules? These fuckers ban emoji domains, maybe they should ban registries from arbitrarily stealing domains with no recourse. Maybe write to them and see if they can move something.
• anon
  undefined
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  ranger_danger
  One time I bought a .dev domain, which is/was run by Google, and after missing the renewal deadline by less than 24 hours, the renewal price jumped from less than $30, to $800.
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  dangus
  I don’t know that the advice is solid in terms of never buying an alternate TLD.
• elAhmo
  Another case of Google extorting users and showing mafia-like behaviour.
• cmsp12
  honestly all of these weird tld are expensive in the long term i dont see the point of getting them
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  mystraline
  So, how is this not libel by Google? The claim was that you were running an "unsafe site". Its their job to prove that, and not just "black box says so".And you have system and reputational damages.Go for small claims suit, $5000. It'll cost more than that for their attorney to go to your jurisdiction.
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  tucnak
  The .com purist advice is sound but you're not getting four-letter domain names that way, and in some ccTLD zones you can still.I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them all anyway. Moved away from Gandi later when they started doing gouging of their own, too.What is HN's opinion on Dynadot?
• squeefers
  sorry but you cant have a domain if google ban it? how does this work?
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  icase
  “never buy a non-.(com|net|org) domain”ftfy
• anon
  undefined
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  soco
  Enshittification at its peak (or is it at its peak already?)
• wordsnaking
  [dead]
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  twapi
  OP shouldn't blame .online registry operator Radix.
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  nickweb
  Hot Take: the proactive action of the registrar here is probably more beneficial than the number of false positives captured. If the registrar is aware that Google is hot on blocking potentially harmful sites, it's right that they take action expeditiously.The bigger problem is the unbanning - for which there should be a better system, probably that should take the form of the registrar having a short grace period to aid in the Google stuff (DNS verification etc.) with additional checks by the registrar to make sure it's not being used for spam/malicious content.The other point being why was Google banning you so quickly? This is the opaque part. Was the site reported? Was there some URL hijinks? That's the thing you'll probably never find out.