Custom domains service deprecation

help.medium.com

17 points·OberstKrueger··4 comments

The upside of this is that now when I visit randomblog.com I won't have to worry if I'm about to be bombarded with mediums "down the app and subscribe" popups.

Wow. Apparently they don't fully understand how their own custom domains work?

Medium custom domains depend on a CNAME, which aliases all record types. This means once the CNAME is in place, no separate CAA is needed -- Medium just needs to serve a CAA record on the CNAME target, and their customers would never have to worry about the CAA.

It is unlikely people are using CNAME for the direct record (e.g. domain.com) since this does not work with the majority of DNS providers. It can work in theory but only if your DNS server has no other records (e.g. SOA, NS, etc) which is not usually the case. In most cases providers like this use a CNAME for 'www' and give IP addresses for the root domain. Which is exactly what medium did according to a couple of posts I found talking about the process.

In all reality that is probably not the actual reason they're deprecating it just a side note or poor excuse attempt.

Shame to see this feature go, but it reduced marketing for medium itself, so I was always surprised by it. Does seem to remove product value though in terms of something people would pay for. So may hurt revenue potentially?

> Medium custom domains depend on a CNAME, which aliases all record types

They don't.

They used a random-letters subdomain with a CNAME for something (identifying user ID maybe), but the actual domain is redirected by setting A records pointing to their servers.

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