Question from newbie

Domain privacy policy

[ledge1]

Hello, just joined, 1st post. I've been interested in the whole domain drop catching thing and then developing a website for a while so today a bought a few inexpensive .coms to get started. When I purchased them there was a privacy option which as you'll know stops my personal details from being shown when people check the ownership of the domain. Obviously I can see the advantages of this in terms of security but does this make it extremely difficult should genuine people want to contact me? Just a few pointers or a brief explanation of the process would be great. I'm sure I'll make plenty of mistakes along the way but I'm keen enough. This site is excellent by the way. Thanks.

[mack]

First of all welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

Having your identity hidden within whois makes sense for a lot of people who possibly run their sites from home or are a small business, but this doesn't mean it needs to be difficult for people to contact you. Providing an easy way to allow site visitors to contact you from your site can be a way round this issue.

One way to do this would be to have a "contact" page on your site. On this page provide a form the user can fill out. When they submit the form is then sent to you as an email. You can then reply to them using the email address they supplied when they made contact. When ever I use this type of system I use server side scripting to send the message to my email address. By doing this the user doesn't have access to my email address. They are only exposed to my true email address if I reply to their message.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Mack.

[Demaestro]

Hey and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

It is a personal choice, if you don't want your name associated with the domain for any reason then you can get the privacy option, I think there is a fee to hide your details.

If you are worried about people being able to contact you for a legit reason then you can just have your contact details on the site itself, without revealing your name you can have email, fax and other contact details listed.

Typically if someone wants to contact someone from a website they use the contact info on the site rather than doing a whois search on the domain registrar.

[bwnbwn]

My feeling on hiding the owner info is pure nonsense and I smell a rat.
Lots of times I check that before buying off a site and those that hide there info I move on.
This is my persoanl opinion for what that may be worth.

Welcome to the group ledge1.