Whats up with the dot at the bottom of the page?

July 19, 2002 11:16 AM

not really a bug, butâ?¦Whatâ??s up with the dot at the bottom of the page? And how come itâ??s blue in MetaTalk? (Maybe that counts as a bug.) I know where itâ??s linked to, but why? Enquiring minds wanna know, or at least mine does.
posted by kirkaracha to bugs at 11:16 AM (8 comments total)

From the sideblog:

Jul 19
As a brief followup to this thread, I've added the dot to the footer of MetaFilter pages. As an owner of several .org domains, I'd much rather have a non-commercial entity looking out for a public resource like the .org domain registry.

posted by timeistight at 11:18 AM on July 19, 2002

looks like someone's using smart quotes!

(I'm looking in your direction kirk....)
posted by mathowie at 11:28 AM on July 19, 2002

In all seriousness, I trust Carl and his group to do the right thing with the .org registry. Every other proposal is from a company with profit motives looking to make a buck. Carl wants to make .org domains as cheap as possible and from what I can tell is true to the orginal spirit of the .org designation. I own MetaFilter.org among others, and felt it was a valid enough concern to use MetaFilter to help out their cause. I could email Carl and ask him to respond here, but he did post in the thread linked on the sidebar.
posted by mathowie at 11:31 AM on July 19, 2002

Matt, I just worry about sites that are non-profits but are large entities. I run a large medical website, we have a .org domain name, would we have to give it up?
posted by mkelley at 12:05 PM on July 19, 2002

I run a .org site, but only because the corresponding .com and .net domain names were already taken.
posted by crunchland at 12:14 PM on July 19, 2002

My personal site is a .org, and I got it only when .COM .NET and .ORG were the only three TLD choices. I don't really want to have to give it up for a .NAME or other TLD. After seeing MeFi's Dot, I went and put one on my site as well. Thanks, Matt.
posted by jazon at 12:50 PM on July 19, 2002

I did searches but missed the link on the sidebar. Anyway, the dot is cool...for me to poop on!

looks like someone's using smart quotes!

I'm not smart enough to use smart quotes; I was using entities--8217 and 8230, copy-'n'-pasted from BBEdit. (So maybe it is a bug report after all.)
posted by kirkaracha at 12:57 PM on July 19, 2002

Hi -

Spread the dot indeed! Thanks Matt!

If anybody is trying to figure out what Matt is talking about ;), this is about a bid by IMS/ISC to run the .org registry. If you want lots more info, you can read the proposal or look at people's comments.

> we have a .org domain name, would we have to give it up?

Absolutely not! No changes to the open registration policy are proposed. What we are proposing is that all funds get plowed back into public infrastructure such a securing the DNS and publishing all the code needed to run the registry as open source.

We're the only real non-profit bid: everybody is a combination of a well-meaning non-profit (e.g., the Red Cross, the Internet Society) and a commercial registry operator. For us, .org is a public trust and should be run as such.

Thanks a bunch for the dot. MetaFilter support means a whole lot to us.

Carl
posted by CarlMalamud at 1:51 PM on July 19, 2002