Wait, if they suspended your domain, can you even transfer it away? if not, that’s really fucking scary.

Njalla takes ownership of every domain purchased on their platform. They do let you transfer domains to another registrar where you could be the owner if your account is in good standing but seems like that may not be the case here (since account suspended)

That may be great for some domain use cases but for most stuff it would be better to have your name on the domain registration

I really like that it is a static website being updated and built on a schedule from github actions.

It would be much more customer and developer friendly to allow linking a service portal instead of providing a phone number. I would go insane if a user called me directly every time one of my projects had a bug or some perceived (non)issue. No, that’s not how this works.

It would be a good idea to at least buy one or several domain .TLDs for open source projects even if you currently aren’t planning to make use of them. If nothing else getting a domain prevents someone else from registering it, and you could start using them to make legitimate results higher in search results. This is easiest when you are first starting a project and can check availability before settling on a name.

The problem is that there are hundreds of TLDs so you’re not going to be able to register them all. Simplex mentioned they reported the domain. If you do an ICANN lookup you can find an abuse email for the domain, which would be an email for the registrar. You can report to that email and it is likely they will remove the site. You can also go directly to the TLD and report abuse to them as well.

Beyond that search for your project every once and a while and see what comes up or what doesn’t come up.

Thanks! I’ll add that to my list to check out

If you only ever keep your repository private AND it is not a fork of a public repo, then you are fine. Full stop.

If you ever fork the repo and make a “INTERNAL” private fork but move the main project public then anything you commit to the private fork will be discoverable through the public project.

Basically you should assume if you make a repo public then the repo and all of its forks will be public-- even if the forks are “private” the commit data can be found through the main repo.

The original report: https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-and-private-repo-data-github

Well to speak of the obvious- open source. I’ve heard good things about obsidian but i am not trusting a closed source app with my notes/ mind-maps

This project looks pretty promising, and is open source.

tldr - lesson learned. buy a new domain and move over to it.

but for those who want to learn something new - you are only renting your domains. If you fail to pay by the registration date then you generally get a grace period to pay more money to renew it. If you fail to pay before that period expires then the domain will be released. Some companies like godaddy will automatically buy the domain for another year (or more). But even if Godaddy doesn’t then it still goes up on a list of expiring domains and there are backorder services that will try to buy the domain or auction them off.

So in the end it doesn’t really matter what registrar you use. If you do not pay, it goes back to a list where people can see it is expiring and then you’ll get some people who either want to legitimately use that domain or more likely they are wanting to try to sell it to you or someone else for more than they buy it for.

And I saw someone mention file a complaint. I’m sorry to say that if you did not have money to renew the domain then you aren’t going to be able to do that either. This is called Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the fee is between $1500-4000 for 1 to 5 domains.. Additionally, just because you file a complaint does not mean the issue will be resolved favorably or timely. These complaints can last years, and there is no guarantee you will get the domain back.

This is why you should always pay your domain rental fee. And if you don’t, then you need to either be willing to pay a ton of money to get it back or you will need to move on. Sorry its a tough lesson to learn but if you’re just a student then you probably weren’t using this to run a business or anything so in the end you are quite fortunate.