Hi, I’ve been considering jumping to Nearly Free Speech, but I’m super confused abt it… Is there any way to create an account without supplying my full address?? Does having a guestbook count against this rule:
These types of sites will be shut down without notice or warning the first time an unresolved issue is brought to our attention: sites that allow anonymous, unregistered, unmoderated content posting (e.g., “chan” sites)
No, they’re talking about mass message boards with no moderation policies, like 4chan (that’s what they mean by “chan” sites). These kinds of sites often have people post illegal content, which can blow back on the hosting company for hosting that kind of content.
I guess if people started using your guestbook that way you could get in trouble, but all it takes is moderating the posts and making sure nobody is posting illegal content or anything like that.
As far as I know, there’s no way to create an account on Nearly Free Speech without providing contact details. Presumably the provider needs to be able to contact you if there’s an issue with payment.
Nor can you register a domain without doing so, but you can pay to have the contact details for your domain obfuscation.
Nobody from NFS has given me grief about my guestbook either, but copying entries over from atabook.org probably counts as moderation. Basically, as long as you aren’t doing illegal shit or encouraging others to do so, you probably won’t get hassled by NFS.
Just be advised that tech support that doesn’t involve reading FAQs or searching the forum will cost you extra. NFS expects customers to be able to use SSH and SFTP, for example.
is it possible to transfer a domain i buy on NFS to another host if i need to?
I don’t have any experience with NFS in particular, but I believe almost all providers do let you do this (I can’t imagine them not). You initiate the transfer at the receiving DNS provider, and release a lock at the original one. There is sometimes some back and forth, but usually you can refresh on the receiving end until the info comes through. I’ve done it a few times and it’s pretty painless once you go through all the steps.
good bc i already bought one ^^"
idk if it’s for europe only (i hope not) but ive never had to pay for whois protection it has always been included
In the US, it usually costs extra.
honestly that’s disgusting. privacy should not be an upcharge
We do a lot of vile shit in the US.
you can say that again
it depends what company you use. Namecheap does it for free.
Hi, I’m Rob, I’m a recent blowin and I will pop through a Hello post, in the next day or two.
You have 2 questions, Firstoff the Domain stuff, Internic used to require a verifiable contact for all domain registrations, ie it was always findable with a Whois lookup. GDPR was a driver for Whois privacy, registrars can use their own contact details. As your name isn’t on the record there is a little bit of risk if you have a dispute with the registrar of if the registrar is unscrupulous and defrauds you but selling your domain (this does happen, although it’s vanishingly rare).
Privacy tends to be a chargeable feature. The margins in the domain industry are tiny, so the cheaper the registrar, the more stuff they tend to charge for,
I’m torn on whether privacy is a good idea, as a domain holder, I like to limit my PII, but as a citizen of the Internet, being able to validate who I’m communicating is an invaluable control. A lot of organisations snow have pricacy on which makes it more difficult to tell if a mail was spam or if a page is a phishing site.
The second question you had was with NFS, I won’t recommend the following because it likely to be in breach of their conditions, but a prepaid credit card could be used and there are services that will generate a valid but none existing postal address (I used one a while back to get a promo from a German magazine that needed a valid German address). There are also plenty of disused phone numbers you could use, for any British readers (and showing my age) I always use the Multi Swap Shop number.
i am in full favor of having my full legall name protected, as well as my psychical home address and phone number hidden. in fact, the name i use online and my irl name are completely different. i am from southeastern europe. as a closeted lgbt person irl having my shit protected is very important to me. while being lgbt isnt illegal, far from it, the overall public perception is overall negative. while i dont hide it online, i do irl, as i am still closeted and will be for the foreseeable feature. i dont want even that ~1% chance of someone who hates my existance hunting down my physical location, or spamming my phone number. if you think domain holder information should be public, you’re free to optout from whois protection.
its also important to remember whois privacy ≠ imunity. if someone is indeed a phisher, scammer, fraudster, etc they can and often will face consequences. registry and registrar DO have domain holder’s real information. what whois protection does is hiding it from public record. and it absolutely should be free (and is in far majority of cases)
think of it as opting out from being listed in public phone books (some mobile and landline providers do this btw). to opt-out from your number being published publicly is completely free. it should be the same with domains, its the same principle.
cant help you there, as i havent used nfs, i mostly joined this conversation to talk about domains.