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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

I think right off the bat since they chose .coop as their TLD, a lot of corporate firewalls auto-block them and they have immediately decided to fight an uphill battle to get allow-listed to be a gem repo.

This does not bode well for the team having the socio-technical savviness to see this project through.

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Really? Maybe I'm naive, but why would .coop be blocked?

It is pretty common that "weird" tlds get blocked more or less whole sale in places you might not expect.

The reason is spam. Before these can get wide spread "normal" adoption they can be heavily used by spammers. Its hard to say if that is because they have desirable look-a-likes available, or if its because the first year is offered at a deep discount. So, systems will get flooded, and on inspection they will see that they don't have any legit traffic from those tlds and will whole sale block them.

.xyz is kind of infamous for being in this situation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

I have no idea if that applies to .coop though.

Pretty sure it is because they are cheep for the first year. And the blocks are often for domains younger than one year, instead of whole tld.

coop has around 12 years of age on xyz at least.

.xyz is open registration and is known to be a spam/abuse source. .coop is restricted to legally-formed cooperatives. Apples and oranges.

I wonder if you can count on some crappy enterprise firewall to make that distinction.

How does `.coop` get used for spam when you need to prove you’re an actual cooperative to get one?

Don't think it will be the TLD specifically. Most corporate firewalls block domains under a certain age, so it will just be a matter of time.

seems like an easy fix in a month with a new TLD though.

How will anything ever change we're still guilted into thinking about crappy default corporate firewalls when choosing a TLD?

Though there's no way that this is something you care about, cmon.

Most places seem to manage.

But thinking that they can disregard all prior Internet history and just slam into the situation with no concern about what came before is pretty on-brand for a project in the Ruby ecosystem.

Ah yes, "slam in" to a situation is definitely the correct terminology for forking a project that was seized from you by a hostile party.

I mean regarding the choice of TLD. Forking the package repository ecosystem I fully understand the incentives; it just strikes me as a very Ruby-ecosystem thing to just assume that `.coop` is a good enough TLD with no consequences for using it relative to choosing to use .org, .com, or .net.

Is there evidence that corporate firewalls commonly block .coop?

Sadly mine does :\ Not that I don't support trying to get it approved, but anyone in a large enough corporation knows that approval for an external source often takes... a very a long time lol

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