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Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended

104 points2 hourswhois.com
sebastiennight55 minutes ago

Of course we launched our Telegram channel just this weekend, so I am feeling pretty happy that I enforced a 15-year old SOP that says "never email links to 3rd-party domains ; always use a redirect"...

Swapping the redirect now for telegram.me, which hopefully won't go down simultaneously

ars47 minutes ago

I would do something that isn't *.me, since it was them that suspended it.

grayhatter53 minutes ago

I appreciate the idea, I'll happily adopt your SOP, seems pretty useful

thanks

RJSquirel12 minutes ago

I can't believe they use GoDaddy as a registrar.

water-data-dude50 minutes ago

You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.

The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:

"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."

Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.

https://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

ivanmontillam47 minutes ago

But if you check the domain's expiration date, it's far away in year 2035.

To the best of my knowledge, a domain can only be renewed in advance for up to 10 years.

(that could be the reason for that status).

chrisweekly33 minutes ago

(2035 is less than 10 years from now)

ivanmontillam29 minutes ago

(Yes, but it expires at 2035-05-20. If you count years by rounding up to integers, there's not enough time room to renew it an additional year. It would make it 11 years.)

michalpleban9 minutes ago

The status that actually says the domain is suspended is serverHold.

shishcat45 minutes ago

I think they just flagged all locks in their admin portal. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/zoTQbwn

anigbrowl14 minutes ago

Telegram is currently the target of legal/regulatory investigations by Russia (alleged extremism), France (likewise), and India (alleged facilitation of national exam leaking/cheating). I'm guessing the latter since it's the most recent and arguably has the most fiscal heft.

Also very surprised to see Telegram was reliant on GoDaddy, notorious for its lack of transparency.

haskman47 minutes ago

We only recently started moving the Functional Programming India community from Telegram to Zulip. That decision is looking better and better!

Imustaskforhelp33 minutes ago

Zulip is amazing. Nothing against that but what are your thoughts on fluxer and the others (recently chatto seems interesting, matrix, stoat are interesting options as well).

Also awesome initiative by the way, how did you end up making it and I'd love to know some backstory about it actually as well.

kaladin-jasnah16 minutes ago

Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.

Imustaskforhelp6 minutes ago

For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.

(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )

kaladin-jasnah4 minutes ago

I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.

ventegus38 minutes ago

I went here for an IP to write in /etc/hosts and no one has posted it yet :(

shishcat36 minutes ago

dig +short @ns-cloud-b1.googledomains.com t.me

149.154.167.99

there you go

codedude641 hour ago

I don't understand I visited the whois site and it seems all it's fine but I don't know if this match with the following cases.

- The site was suspended but now it's ok - The site was not suspended - There is other information about telegram suspended

withinrafael25 minutes ago

Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?

Tiberium57 minutes ago

Direct link to the registry to verify the domain status (JSON): https://rdap.identitydigital.services/rdap/domain/t.me, Ctrl+F for "server hold"

qurren1 hour ago

Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.

Tiberium1 hour ago

The "serverHold" status is not set by GoDaddy, but by the actual .ME registry https://domain.me/

GoDaddy could apply "clientHold" but not "serverHold"

glitchy9951 minutes ago

Weird. The .me registry specifically says there are no restrictions and even advertises Telegram.

loloquwowndueo49 minutes ago

What’s your beef? The name? Because I’ve been super happy with porkbun but damn, that name… and then the official-sounding ones like network solutions are quite shady. don’t judge a registrar by its name I guess.

d3Xt3r26 minutes ago

Not the person you replied to, but GoDaddy are (or at least, were) pretty jnfamous for their sleazy and sexist ads, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi0AqS4e6NI

So I can't imagine any serious organisation wanting to do business with them, unless they're a sleazy organisation themselves.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...

qurren29 minutes ago

It just doesn't sound professional, and I wouldn't want some "daddy" in a garage in charge of my domain name.

bawolff40 minutes ago

I mean, there was that whole elephant hunting thing...

Waterluvian58 minutes ago

It’s absolutely #%^*ing bizarre to me how many 500+ employee tech companies use it. I just don’t get it. I know IT isn’t web developers but they ought to at least have better opinions on this kind of thing?

tarr111 hour ago

Which do you recommend?

belorn35 minutes ago

I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.

Otherwise just use which ever registrar is cheapest and who you think will handle any quirks or shenanigans that registries may do to domains you own, and which own system and processes hold high enough standard for you.

conception57 minutes ago

porkbun are great

Drakim46 minutes ago

I also recommend porkbun

+1
cute_boi44 minutes ago
rationalist39 minutes ago

Dynadot. One of the largest registrars, and very competitive pricing like Namecheap. They also have very good features.

570165240058 minutes ago

squarespace is legit. GCP cloud domains are moved to them.

lolinder46 minutes ago

I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.

You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.

SoftTalker1 hour ago

I've never had a problem with Namecheap but I'm not sure they are really any better as I've never had a problem with GoDaddy either.

sebastiennight52 minutes ago

My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.

I wonder if the practice still exists.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...

glitchy9948 minutes ago

My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.

IAmGraydon45 minutes ago

Weird. I've been a customer for 15 years and never had any such problem.

kennywinker56 minutes ago

Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.

lolinder51 minutes ago

Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.

Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.

konart51 minutes ago

I'm quite comfortable with Netim

s13k57 minutes ago

porkbun

neverusingit44 minutes ago

Stupid fucking name

qurren54 minutes ago

AWS Route53 or Namecheap

IAmGraydon46 minutes ago

Cloudflare

arm321 hour ago

[flagged]

yakohere1 hour ago

I stored all of my user images links with t.me and on my telegram mini app all users profile don't show the image. Switching to telegram.me

ars48 minutes ago

That's not likely to help, it was the .me people that suspended it, they will likely do the same with telegram.me

yakohere1 hour ago

for a second I thought i was hacked

dgellow1 hour ago

Seems to be working fine? What does suspended imply here?

Tiberium1 hour ago

It might be working fine for you if the DNS server you're using hasn't propagated this change yet. The Google DNS server has: https://dns.google/query?name=t.me&rr_type=A&ecs=

Suspended means the "serverHold" status. I haven't found any official blog post/announcement yet, but the status is unambiguous, and the fact that it happened to one of the Telegram's main short links means that it might be related to legal matters.

NDlurker1 hour ago

Any explanation?

monkeywork46 minutes ago

someone enforcing a min character policy on them?

shishcat41 minutes ago

No. There are still many 1 char .ME domains available, and they've always costed an high price. https://imgur.com/a/0NL7oA6

shishcat51 minutes ago

serverHold means like "suspicious activity, domain is administratively held and taken off dns"

ceeam1 hour ago

[flagged]

CrzyLngPwd57 minutes ago

[flagged]

kennywinker52 minutes ago

Do you know the reason, or are you just assuming censorship?

EGreg1 hour ago

This is what the problem is with DNS.

ceeam1 hour ago

[flagged]

ivanmontillam59 minutes ago

It has existed for a while, it's called HNS[0].

--

[0]: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd

petcat44 minutes ago

Telegram was always shady as hell.