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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

On a side note, there seems to be a lot of links being posted from vanity TLDs such as .christmas. Isn't there a risk of these links ending up broken in a matter of nothing?

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Most of these have been originating from bekk.christmas it seems, who are making advent calendar blog posts leading up to christmas about a variety of topics under various .christmas domains.

They apparently did it last year as well, so the domains have lasted at least a year, then?

.christmas seems to be owned by Uniregistry[0], which also owns at least 26 other TLDs, so I think we can expect them to continue providing service.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

My concern doesn't lie with the TLD registrar, but with the interest in, say, maintaining a .christmas domain in non-christmas times of the year.

There is chrismas every year.

Yes, and it's relevant for a month tops?

Who will be more compelled to click on a Christmas link in, say, July? A christmas-themed link in February or March seems stale as hell.

Domains expire after a year, so it you'll always be renewing around Christmas. Unless you were referring to maintaining the site itself, which yes, probably won't have any new postings around July.

We saw a steady flow of traffic all through last year on a few .christmas domains from last year's advent calendars.

I don't think they seem stale, but perhaps out of season Either way, we're committed to keep this content online for the foreseeable future, and write a new edition next year if people find it interesting.

On a side, side note — Are those funky TLDs really widely supported/interpreted as links when not using http in main-stream apps (Mail or even browsers)?

Worse, everything.anything is now treated as a domain, leading to accidentally trying to browse when watching to search for dot separated programming terms such as libraries.

This happens on Twitter a lot. I've seen a lot of people referencing names of libraries, events, etc. and them being turned into links to URLs that don't exist. (.app is a common one for this.)

Twitter could try to resolve this domain first before formatting text as a link.

Accidental typos (better yet, missing space after a period) also triggers some clients to send HTTP requests to the pseudo-URL to build up a quick view, which sounds like a potential security problem.

It also happens, rather unfortunately, with my aging parents who love to sign off emails with 'xxx' and are often missing the space after the final period and ending word of the email. Some of the results are guaranteed risky clicks.

why would the TLD disappear?

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