Frequently asked

What is this site?

A catalog of questions and answers about domain names: registration and renewal, registrars and transfers, expiry and drop catching, valuation and resale, parking, trademarks and UDRP disputes. Cards filed between 2009 and 2011 come from the original question-and-answer site. Newer cards come from reader submissions.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no account system at all. You can read everything, file a question and leave a comment without registering, without logging in and without giving an email address.

What happens to something I submit?

It goes into a queue that only the maintainer can see. If it is accepted it becomes part of the catalog at the next build, which is a deploy of static files, so it is not instant. If it is rejected nothing is published.

What kind of question gets answered?

• Specific enough that a correct answer exists.
• About domain names.
• Written plainly.
• Useful to somebody other than you.

Search the catalog first. A question already on file is answered by pointing at the existing card rather than by opening a second one. Questions that ask for opinion, argument or open-ended discussion are not filed. This is a reference desk, not a forum.

Can I edit a card?

No. The 2009 site let users with enough reputation edit each other's questions and answers, wiki style. This one does not. Send a correction from the contact page with the accession number and it will be made to the record.

What about reputation, badges and bounties?

None of it exists. Those were features of the Stack Exchange 1.0 application that ran here until 2011. The application is gone and none of that came back with the content.

Why do some pages say ARCHIVE and carry no question?

The 2010 data dump contains 105 answers whose questions had already been deleted when the dump was taken. There is no way to recover what they were answering. They are filed under /archive/, marked noindex and kept out of the sitemap, because an answer with no question should not compete in search results. They are kept at all because this is the only copy that exists.

What is the number on the card?

Circulation: how many times that card has been pulled. It adds a live count measured since the catalog reopened to the historical count the old application recorded before 2011. The about page sets out exactly how the two parts are separated.

What does the site record about me?

Page views are counted, per card, with no cookie and no identifier that persists. If you submit something, a salted hash of your address is stored so that submissions can be rate limited; the address itself is never written down. There is no login, no tracking pixel and no advertising.

Is there a feed?

Yes, at /feed.xml. The 2010 pages advertised one in their markup that was never actually served.

Something is broken or a link is dead.

Report it from the contact page. Links inside archived answers point at a 2010 web and many of the destinations are gone. Those are left exactly as they were recorded rather than quietly rewritten.