I paid 5 bucks or so to registerfly.com, only to find out that you had to have them as your registrar as well, which makes sense. The problem is they didn't tell me about this before I handed them the cash.

Anyway, I'm talking about the services that offer to cover your whois information with info about the company. That is, your name in any whois for the domains you sign up with is removed, and contact info for the company providing this service is left. They all claim to be secure; leaving full actual ownership to you.

I'm only interested in this to avoid any... volatile... users from doing anything their mother wouldn't approve of.

Anyone have any experience with this? Thoughts?

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Selfunaware.com

Honestly, in my personal experience, I have found that the majority of people do not provide full information when registering a domain. I wouldn't want to give anything away, but I might just be one of those people . I dont know if others use these services or not, but just do a whois search on large domains out there. You'll find that few of them have personal contact information. Check ours for example - http://www.whois.sc/adminfusion.com

That's just my own personal observation - I wouldn't want to give you any advice that will get you in trouble. I know people and registrars will say that you absolutely must provide accurate information, but for the life of me, I have never seen any disputes over this or anbody getting in trouble over it. Besides, I know that GoDaddy allows you to maintain multiple sets of contact information. They do have my accurate contact information, but it is not tied to my domains - just my account.

Well, I had changed my name to my "company", or organization name, and I got warning emails allegedly from internic or whoever stating that "false whois" info will result in revoked domains.

I've got a spare domain I can try it on, I suppose. Better than paying some iffy company.

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Selfunaware.com

Interesting...well, I'd love to see something documented about why you have to provide all contact information and what happens if you do not - I can't imagine that they would revoke the domain right from under you. I'm sure they would ask you to provide correct contact info OR your domain will be revoked.

Dotster also sends out notices that your info must be legit. However, if you are signed up with a registrar and you use their service to protect your identity, that isn't the same thing as providing false information from the beginning. What you are doing is providing your registrar with accurate info and then having them protect it. I use Namecheap for most of my domains and they offer this service as well. I've only used it when they give away the service for free when you register a new domain. However, it's perfectly legitimate to do it this way. Now, if I purposely enter invalid info, then I am taking a chance of losing my domain from ICANN.

Another thing I have done to protect myself is I have a P.O. Box that I use for all of my domains. I use it for other reasons too but this way when some scam companies grab whois info and send me snail mail spam, it goes to the P.O. Box. Most of that junk just gets thrown out. Plus it protects me if I tick someone off online and they want to find out where I live.

Edit: Here's a document that I found that talks about this topic as well: http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac003.htm

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Mark Blair
NowParenting - "Parenting Discussion Community"
HostHideout - "Where Professionals Discuss Web Hosting"

Interesting link, but it does not tell me anything I do not already know.

I was aware that allowing a 3rd party company to put their information is legal, since they contact you with any subpoenas and the like, but blow off all the angry forum members (heh) is legal. Does it have to be the domain registrar?

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Selfunaware.com

I understand that you may know of this already but some other people may not. It's good for those that stroll into this thread without knowing the full rules.

As far as if the domain registrars are the only ones that can offer a service like this, I'm not sure. I haven't specifically seen any other companies offer this and they may have to have some sort of affiliation with ICANN to be allowed to do this. If I find any further information about this issue, I will definitely post it here.

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Mark Blair
NowParenting - "Parenting Discussion Community"
HostHideout - "Where Professionals Discuss Web Hosting"

Like Ryan, I don't always give specific details. However, most of my domains are for sale, so completely lying is a idea. Otherwise, no one could contact me to buy the domain. I do have some domains which are just plain wrong. I made up everything and no one seems to care. I know of people who wanted to buy a domain, but the contact info was wrong. They tried reporting it to the registrar and it looks like nothing happened.

There was that one survey that came out that showed that an insanely high percentage (can't remember it exactly) of domain registrations have false info. I got a package of domains once where one of them was .de. That's Germany's country code for those that don't know. It also came with the .us version. You have to be a citizen of those countries to get the domains, so I used my real US address and then made up a German address by going to a website of a music company that I know had an office in Germany and used their address with my name.

You're not supposed to do it, but nothing seems to happen if you do.

Ha. This is a good thread. Thanks for the info and experiences. I'm going to go try something now.

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Selfunaware.com