Men are officially the worst… top-level domain The internet has a case of .men behaving badly, based on new data from international watchdog Spamhaus. In a listing of the top ten worst top-level domains compiled by Spamhaus, .men has come top, followed somewhat bizarrely by .GQ, which is the country code for Equatorial Guinea but also happens to be the name of a famous men …
you'll have what companies are also seeing. Start with .stream and .pw
Some large companies are simply blocking all 1,000+ and allowing exceptions as needed. The new stuff is as big a cesspool as .info and .biz turned out to be. If you're a real company, don't even think about using .pro because the real "pros" have beat you to it.
I don't think we need any of the new TLDs, and I'm not even sure why people are buying them. I can see a few cases for some things, usually geographic ones like .nyc or .london. Otherwise, the lists are full of domains that cost a ridiculous amount, thus virtually guaranteeing that nobody will use them, redundant names (.accountant and .accountants both exist because, you know, why not) and some that are now owned by corporations (.google? Why?). We don't need them. Delete them all.
FWIW, back in 2004 I got inundated with spam. Worse than usual. Really pissed me off. After digging thru the logs[0], I decided to blackhole every TLD that didn't exist prior to 2000, with an easy to understand provision to whitelist exceptions for people who could make a case for accessing specific "new" TLDs. The policy has been in place ever since. Today, there are a total of 37 TLDs in the whitelist, and I haven't heard a single complaint from the userbase[1] in four or five years.
Choices like this are hard to make, and YMMV. Beer seems to help, especially when explaining the situation to business owners. This round's on me.
[0] perl is your friend ... no, really!
[1] Friends, family, some businesses large and small, some schools large and small, a couple of non-profits, etc.
the third worst registry - .loan – with 59 per cent bad domains and a 6.22 index.
I really hate sans-serif fonts - I read that as .Ioan not .loan. Couldn't work out why there was a TLD of .Ioan, but not .dafydd, .gareth, .mair, .lowri or .nia - and why anyone would fill it with badness. Most of the Ioans I know are really nice blokes.
What is the point in analyzing dodgy domains and sites by the TLD they are in? do punters generally think a .com is more likely to be legit than others?
As far as I'm concerned the TLD is about as meaningful as the day-of-the-week it was registered as an indicator of whether the domain is likely to be dodgy or not.
I think the point is that tlds are operated by multiple companies, some of which may have a laxer attitude towards not kicking known spammers off. Hence some tlds may end up with more bad domains. Still, the approach of simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses who are operating legitimately and have got domains with those tlds because they make for logical or more easily remembered domain names.
"simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses"
No more unfair than people not visiting shops built in a dodgy part of town. It's up to you to make sure your new business address is in a "nice" part of TehIntraWebTubes, not in a slum that everybody shuns.
Still, the approach of simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses who are operating legitimately and have got domains with those tlds because they make for logical or more easily remembered domain names.
I don't think it is. A business chooses to brand itself as part of its advertising - it's a way to attract customers. If that brand proves counterproductive, that's the fault of the business.
A shop named "Crap Pizza" would be memorable, and in the case of many pizza chains logical. That doesn't mean it'd be a good branding move, or that it'd be "unfair" if, say, local Chamber-of-Commerce types declined to highlight it in their list of local attractions.
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