Discuss mailing list

[Calum McAlinden <calum AT mcalinden.me.uk>]

On 7 April 2014 05:16, subhuman <discipline AT gmx.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Apr 2014 23:29:46 +0100
> Of course I can only speak for myself, but as far as I'm concerned your 
> impression is wrong. I own two .null domains and would very much like to 
> see them alive. However, this seems to be impossible. The only webhoster I 
> know of who accepts OpenNIC namestuff, 000webhost.com, has a very rigid 
> traffic policy, and when they come to the conclusion that a domain is 
> inactive they shut it down - which they do after just one week. 
> Unfortunately they are kind enough to remove every content as well. Which 
> means that I may be "allowed" to activate my domains, but just one week 
> later they kick me back to square one. Hence they are simply useless for 
> me. On the other hand I simply lack the financial means to rent a 
> synchronous DSL line with a fix IP address.

I don't find myself limited in terms of (free) hosting options for
OpenNIC: Heroku seems to support any hostname whether it is publicly
resolvable or not, and there are probably many similar hosts like
this.

> Second, what you complain about is the result of OpenNIC's own policy 
> decisions. If OpenNIC accepted real money and not exclusively that geekish 
> namecoin nonsense, we quite naturally would become attractive to other 
> users than geeks.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here... opennicproject.org looks
like it accepts donations via PayPal and Bitcoin. Namecoin is another
alternative and decentralised DNS system which works in a similar way
to Bitcoin. Personally, I think it would be great if OpenNIC resolved
.bit TLDs. Does anyone have any view on that?

> As far as I see it, OpenNIC has the appearance of a geek project, and as 
> long as this image doesn't change... Why is it that the search engine's 
> name is seek.geek, not seek.free? See what I mean?

I agree. I chose the domain seek.geek because there were no viable
alternative TLDs that would make sense for the search engine (also, it
rhymes). That's why I think that a more general short TLD is needed,
but I'm not sure what.  OpenNIC could be like Bitcoin: still used
primarily by geeks, but very well known.

At the moment, I'm working on a little website with easy installation
instructions, wizards, and server uptime monitoring (also ranking
servers by distance from user IP address). I hope that in the future
this will be able to effectively convert some non-geeks to OpenNIC.


Also, if Peter ever reads this email: I wan't to say thanks for being
friendly, welcoming and helpful when I first discovered this project
:)

-- 
Calum McAlinden
http://www.mcalinden.me.uk