2003 Request of Afghanistan for Redelegation of the .af Top-Level Domain | Hacker News Reader

2003 Request of Afghanistan for Redelegation of the .af Top-Level Domain

iana.org

26 pointsgudvardur19 comments

Off topic, but I spent a bunch of time on this domain recently as we used AF as an internal code for Africa and whoever set it up assumed we'd never have customers from Afghanistan. An assumption that was correct for 5 years :D

You (edit: They) do know that Africa isn't a country, right? Because I'm struggling to think of a company form that has a field for 'continent'.

There are also international standards for country codes. Using standards almost always saves work down the road, and sometimes much more.

It's a little unfair to blame sixhobbits for this, since they pretty clearly stated "... whoever set it up ..." was responsible for the assumption.

There is the eu for Europe so I think it's reasonable to think Africa being a possibility.

Yup that's .africa for "the African and Pan African communities and users" and the African Union. Technically .eu is for the European Union, not the continent of Europe.

yes we're based in South Africa so are pretty aware of this.. we group by larger areas for certain functionality, including 'EU' as guessed by someone in this thread.

>I'm struggling to think of a company form that has a field for 'continent'.

You'd be very, very surprised then. Sometimes even continent is more specific than required. Where I work, I'm part of the North American team. I also have clients who have datacenters in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) or APAC (Asia/Pacific), both of which terms cover far more than one continent.

A client I'm working with right now has a South American datacenter, it's located in Peru but it covers all of their South American operations and is handled by our South American support team. If you asked them where the datacenter is, they'd say South America (and we did ask, and they answered that, and it was good enough for us to schedule resources for them).

Our official forms will accept continent or geographical region because most of the time this is granular enough. If you're in Africa, you want a datacenter in Africa... or at least in EMEA. A North American datacenter is a last resort for you, no matter which state or city it's in.

I hope people don't end up using this for AF (as f*) e.g. www.lit.af

Why?

Posting this on Hacker News is probably counterproductive to your goals.

Why not? Novelty domain names are awesome.

As is swearing; you can say fuck, we're all adults here. It's not like using stars hides the swear word you intended to use.

Also, it could help getting more people to understand that there is not just .com + maybe their national domain. Working with non-digital natives (but also the younger generations) often shows me how little understanding for the web there actually is. It became even worse with the App Store: "What is a browser?" Well...

This was what I initially thought of as well. I figured that Christmas Islands made some money from the .cx TLD (from abcdse.cx type domains, a la the infamous goatse.cx)?

My less mature side could imagine something like idg.af selling for quite a bit.

If you'd like to make an offer shoot me an email :)

Reminds me of http://hack.af

My band did this, Hujo, our website is http://www.hujo.af cause... well... we are Hujo as f$3k...

I tried that URL out. It works.

People are already using it for that and many of the popular words that could work that way are already taken.

I tried registering a .af domain around ten years ago. At the time the Afghan NIC registration process involved downloading a PDF application, manually filling out your WHOIS info and nameservers, then emailing it to them. Registration fees were paid via a wire transfer to their NY bank account. Actually it turns out this is still the process [1]

Eventually though I found a registrar that supports .af domains and I was able to secure mine :^)

[1] http://nic.af/en/page/what-we-do/afgnic/af-registration

Reply on news.ycombinator.com