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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 somet
by teddyh 2y ago
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 must be done there, too. It should not be a domain owner’s responsibility to get out of being unfairly blacklisted.
It’s like when cars took over the streets, and instead of blaming cars for being dangerous for regular people using the streets for walking, the concept of “jaywalking” was invented by car companies to place the blame on people for daring to obstruct cars. Or the concept of “personal carbon footprint”, commonly used to move blame from companies to individuals, when in reality whatever individuals, even in aggregate, could do is utterly insignificant compared to what companies and legislation could accomplish.
- quotemstr 2y agoWho says it's the fault of the domain in some abstract sense? A house becomes haunted when something bad happens in it. It's not the fault of the rafters and joists. I think "haunted" is an apt description.
- teddyh 2y ago“Haunted” still implies that the problem exists at the house/domain, and can be fixed there. But a domain being blacklisted is not something which a domain owner can fix by themselves, they have to beg the blacklister to de-list them.
- sealeck 2y agoYou'd usually describe a house as haunted if something bad has happened in the past (e.g. a murder, evil spirits, etc) and people are superstitious about this (e.g. believe some ghosts are still living in the house). Hard to see how an owner can fix this. All the usual problems the owner can fix (floorboards need replacing, gutters need cleaning, general repairs) aren't really examples of a house being "haunted".
- johnisgood 2y agoOh, I know people who spray holy water all around the house as a "possible remedy".
- sealeck 2y ago> 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 must be done there, too. It should not be a domain owner’s responsibility to get out of being unfairly blacklisted. These kinds of blacklists exist because these domains have been used to host scams or distribute spam (or some other malicious activity) in the past. They're there to protect people (e.g. so that Firefox can disply a "warning: this site is a scam") and reduce abuse. They're not just there so people at Google can get a good kick out of blacklisting random domains.
- tekchip 2y agoI'm guessing here because I'm not the author but I believe this statement is directed towards the blocklisting entities because they don't provide transparencies or a method to reach them to resolve issues with a domain once it's aquired by someone else. That absolutely is the issue of those entities.
- chrischen 2y agoIf you could get out of blacklists by transferring ownerships then people can “wash” domains by fake transfers.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoAt one point of time when I had to deal with people submitting phishing links to a web service I owned, I learned some of the tricks that phishers use to get around reports, such as using IP geolocation or the accept-language and accept-encoding header to determine if the phishing page should be served. With tricks like this, it's not a surprise to see why the companies operating blocklists are hesitant to make this process easy; after all, what's to prevent the phishers from temporarily stating that the issue has been resolved to get out of the denylist, and then restarting their campaign again?
- Seattle3503 2y agoIf the process required you to verify ID, e.g. a passport + video selfie, some accountability might be possible. But that might be too invasive for many folks.
- perching_aix 2y agoI 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 extremely unhelpful and is guaranteed to derail conversations for no benefit whatsoever.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI couldn't disagree more. What you've written is both apologetics and simply untrue.
- perching_aix 2y agoSorry to hear you feel that way.
- cj 2y ago> 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. 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?
- perching_aix 2y ago> Does the lifecycle matter much, though? How could it not? It's essentially the same issue as an unmaintained phonebook or a map. What's at a given address or phone number changes, and if your solution is not equipped to handle that change, your solution is bad.
- bryanbraun 2y agoThe 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 sure feels like the domain itself is tainted somehow.
- teddyh 2y agoWe should avoid words and concepts which places the blame unfairly on mostly powerless individuals.
- deltarholamda 2y ago"Haunted" is actually a pretty good descriptor. 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.
- detourdog 2y agoblacklisted would be a good description as well.
- CityOfThrowaway 2y agoBlacklist is too concrete. With some domains, you merely will find a higher % of your emails land in spam, or your content ranks a bit worse, etc. There's a somewhat random continuum. Haunting is a funny word that does sort of include some variability.
- detourdog 2y agoYes, but they are on some blacklist somewhere. One could say greylisted. The point is the whatever term describes the issue shouldn't be mystical. Haunted implies a supernatural condition that just isn't helpful in system administration. If something isn't working with a service there is always a method to troubleshoot and isolate the issue. Contact the appropriate people when needed. This is how NeoTokyo restored his "listed" domain.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iwontberude 2y ago[flagged]
- simonh 2y ago> by entirely too powerful entities So, haunted then?
- furyofantares 2y agoHouses are also not haunted, so it's fine. It's also fine to have fun.