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.tk domains, WTF?
pubcrawler
Banned
Saw some of these .tk domains posted on here last week.
Went and registered a few, for free. (it's a free registrar with a paid upsale)
Logged in today and they are gone from account.
Anyone that can explain why?
Comments
I think you have to actually use them within 48 hours, or was that co.cc?
Did you activate them and start using them? Possibly why they're gone
I only saw a minimum usage over a month or something with .tk domains...
Looks like a fairly loose policy where they try to catch anything they think might be abuse of their free registration.
You need to have a working website within 24 hours I think. Otherwise they will cancel it.
Personally wouldn't rely on a .tk domain for much..
If you're after more reliable and less abused service, Afraid.org's free DNS has proven to be pretty good.
http://freedns.afraid.org/
Within 24 hours
That's funny. What a dumb system.
I never saw that "regulation" anywhere.
What is ultimately screwed up is they yank the domain and then make it unable to be registered.
i think they just want that you will really use what you register. i have 12 free .tk domains with no problem.
dot.tk is a very shady registrar. I recall a policy where you could register a "free" domain, but if anyone paid them for that same domain they would take it from you and give it to whoever paid for it. A disaster waiting to happen. Not sure if that's still the case.
I'm not sure why you'd pick .tk over any other free subdomain provider with full DNS control anyway.
That's some crazy routine there @joepie91. If people could snake a domain out form under you then the .tk domain registrar should be buried. That's utter crap.
I have no problem using what I register
It's been a week tops, that isn't much time.
Their registration BS only says this:
I thought they offered full DNS control to free users as well? How would they be able to determine the amount of visitors?
Back in the day there was some advertisement placed on your page somehow. I think they put your site in a container then.
Correct. They used a frameset if I recall correctly, where they had a top or bottom bar with an ad for dot.tk itself. It also spawned a popup with third-party advertising (and occasionally advertising for dot.tk itself).
I do however recall hearing that this was changed a few years ago, and they now offer you access to your DNS records directly (most "free domain" registrars seem to have followed suit in this).
They permit you DNS record access, but all hits go through their servers first.
For example, cloudflare will reject you because the nameservers are NS1-NS5.DOT.TK and can't be changed. Your DNS option in panel basically just adds some NS/CNAMEs for www
I'm pretty sure dot.tk let you set your own nameservers.
It's to prevent hoarders.
That is.. yes, just stupid.
Hoarders are deterred by having to actually drive minimum of traffic and/or apparently have a site there immediately.
Shame.
I sent them a contact email asking what happened. If they don't respond or resolve, no worries, I just won't use them and certainly will recommend anyone else that asks to avoid.
.tk domains are old, and well-known to have such problems. I do thought about that project (supporting Tokelau) but some things about them make me ran
dot.tk/.tk is the biggest scam I've ever seen.
I've moved a web page from a .us.to domain to one of those .tk domains and after hours of work it was all gone. I was out side for an hour. Came back and my domain was removed from my account without a reason. There was nothing illegal on my web page. Just a coding blog, a small community forum for it and a Wiki made with DokuWiki.
I never got any mail, notice or whatever from them about the incident. Nor there is a way to contact them to clear things up.
F*** this bullshit... Bunch of kids, illegal shit hosted under this shitty domain, fraud and much much more. FreeDNS.afraid.org isn't better. I've created a domain for my Hostigation LEB and pointed it to my VPS and b00m, 1 minute later my account got locked and the reason was "Account closed...". What? What's your problem? Lost some important domains I had on that account. Also bullshit.
Ouch! @Nevil. We need more of these stories.
I smell a .tk sham.
Spare me the free-as-Google equals no inferred rights, recourse, etc. Companies doing weird stuff and misrepresenting things should be held to a public fire.
The domains on FreeDNS belong to individuals, and only an idiot would use a domain there for important stuff as the owner of the domain can do whatever he want and cause you to lose it.
Agree @gubbyte, the "FreeDNS" model is really not a good one other than for screwing around and arguably unsafe for even that.
The account was locked down by FreeDNS administrator, not the domain owner.
And what kind of reason is "Account closed..."?
I would stay away from .tk domains, $10/year for a .com is worth it just to have more control over the domain (none of this auto-delete stuff)
I'm sure why anyone would want a .tk domain anyhow. I understand the appeal of a free domain, but when Google doesn't index it (right?) and it's an extension that's ignored by most because of it's association with shadiness, why would you want it?
I've never visited a site worth knowing about that was a .tk site. It'd be good if you just want to mess around with your first site or something, other than that, grab some quarters from the couch and save a couple dollars from your lunch money, see if your Mom and Dad will let you order a domain from a legit registar.
Is this true that Google doesn't index tk domains? What in the world is up with that? Talk about crazy control freak behavior out of the almighty Google.
The lure is free obviously, as we are on lowendtalk
I thought I remember reading, and I could of sworn it was here that I read it, that Google stopped indexing .TK domains. Though it may of been .co.cc or both, I don't know.
It'd be a great free domain if it wasn't for everything else. Have a photo blog of travels that you just want to show your family? Good domain. Working on learning webdev and not for a public porfolio? Good domain.
Anything else, not good. (This is of course just one man's opinion)
I agree @MannDude. We were using or intending to for putzing around with non profit type projects.
Jul 1, 2011
That is right, Google has removed, deindexed, banned and penalized any site using a co.cc subdomain. Why? As I noted, Google’s Matt Cutts explained on Google + that Google reserves the right if they “see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole,” Matt said.
And it not only happened to a free host but a free domain name register and host, co.cc. It is not the first time Google banned a whole free-host, they did so back in May, a couple months ago.
Now a search of google with: site:.tk returns 37,700,000 results. So still in there for those.
Question is if it's a demotion in ranking factor.
Google has waaayyyy too much random discretionary power. Search should be open sourced and ran as a non profit entity without all the manipulation. Just imagine if we had all this foolishness years age in the card catalog or in the Yellow Pages.