Frequently asked questions

What is this site?

Questions about domain names, with answers. Registering one, moving it between registrars, what happens when it expires, what one is worth, and what to do when somebody else has the name you want. The questions asked between 2009 and 2011 come from the original question-and-answer site. Newer ones come from readers.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no account system at all. You can read everything, ask 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 only the maintainer can see. A person reads it. If it is accepted it is published by hand, so it will not appear the moment you press the button. 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 first. A question already on the site is answered by pointing at the page that has it rather than by opening a second one. Questions that ask for opinion, argument or open-ended discussion belong on a forum and are not published here.

Can I edit a question?

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 question 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?

There are 105 answers here whose questions had already been deleted when the old site was saved. There is no way to recover what they were replying to. They sit 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 under VIEWS?

How many times that page has been viewed. It adds a live count measured since the site 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 question, 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. It carries the thirty most recent questions.

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.