VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Bailey]

I did a random check on Whois with a few of those from the VO-BB with websites. I noticed that some had protected info concerning Administrative Contact and Technical contact. I later found that this protection is relatively inexspensive and is available online.

I've read about the advantages to having your domain protected during Whois searches. I'm just wondering if it is of any real concern to those on this board?
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"Bailey"
a.k.a. Jim Sutton
Retired... Every day is Saturday, except Sunday.
VO-BB Member #00044 .gif" alt="W00T" border="0" />
AOVA Graduate 02/2004 ;
"Be a Voice, not an Echo."

[Bish]

We are all rightly concerned about privacy, but I think some are overly diligent, even to the extent of doing it as a knee-jerk in the face of those chanting, "be afraid!" ... It's become a mantra.

"I'm not giving my client my bank details." - They are the same details as on any check you've ever written.

"I'm not giving them my credit card number." - Yet people quite happily hand it over in a restaurant to be taken away by a waiter.

"I'm not giving them my address." - It's public record and where are they going to send the check?

If a whois search gives my name and contact details, then they are more than likely the same ones on the web site anyway. Sure, the info can be harvested more easily by bots (and in five years, I've had one unsolicited email from someone offering me alternate domain hosting services)... but if I own a business with a website, why would I pay to hide the fact that I actually own the website?

Of course... if my business was predatory or nefarious, then I'd pay for the service and hide.
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Mike Harrison]

I bought my current domain in 2005, and had to deal with plenty of spam and telemarketing until I added domain privacy. Since then, both have dropped to nearly nothing.

Since converting my site to WordPress a few years ago, there have been thousands of attempted (and just a couple of successful) hackings of my site, which added security measures have taken care of. These hacking attempts – which were certainly not limited to my site, but WordPress sites around the world – have come from Russia, all over Asia, Europe, South America and many even from this country. The less would-be hackers know, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

For the record, however, I am in favor of security cameras in public places and red light cameras.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Bish]

I hear you with the hacking stuff... however, that's due more to opportunists sniffing around for an open, unprotected port or fundamental weakness in the host's set-up. When I used to run a home-based Apache web-server for a while (pre-VO), there were certainly thousands of people constantly pinging, looking to see if a door had been left open. This however, was nothing to do with my name being known from a whois list. To be honest, it's also one of the reasons I never considered ever having a WordPress site... they seem to have been plagued with security issues over the years... and have always been quite slow in acknowledging and fixing them.

Maybe I've be lucky... but after spending years in IT, I like to think I've got a reasonable handle on stuff and take reasonable precautions... it's just that I see no big concern with this specific whois issue.

... and now I've probably tempted fate and will get my site vandalized by a thirteen year old Russsian wunderkind
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Mike Harrison]

I think WordPress is much stronger now than you may remember from earlier versions. Between WordPress itself and the plugins I chose, my security is excellent. Files once prone to access by outsiders are no longer, and my WordPress admin login page won't even display for any ip address other than my own.

A lot of the hackings of other sites have been successful because (as I was surprised to learn) many site owners/admins kept the default login name (usually Admin) and chose very simple passwords. My username is unique and my password is a random string of 24 characters.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Ed Fisher]

I'm a big believer in keeping you website info private.

You have no idea how much spam I used to get on a daily basis. Whois and Betterwhois have improved things a bit. But in the beginning there was software that would simply scan their records and pull up a bunch of email addresses.

I had close to 200 domain names at one time. I've been trying to cull a bunch of these and let them go in the last couple of years. If it were business, I had to have the .com, the .net and the.org and if it were a popular term I had to also have the plurals, etc. (I know...it got WAY out of hand) But, I'm trying to improve.

I switched to 1&1.com years ago because of the fact that they offered free private registration and Godaddy wanted to charge extra. But that was also when domains were ...something like 4.95 a year. (1and1 was much cheaper at the time)

Since then prices have shot way up and I've heard that GoDaddy will throw in the private registration if you have over 5 domains with them. (not sure about this. I need to take the time to confirm) 1and1 seems to have made it a real pain to try to switch from them (last I checked) So...moving away from them is somewhere on my to do list.

With your name, address and email for the world to see and scan. You can look forward to more emails and ALSO snail mail trying to sell you CRAP and taking up even more of your time. And between the phone calls that already steal my time on a daily basis...every little bit helps. If getting emails offering to improve your sex life with some Oriental herb is your thing...then by all means...let your little registration light shine.

But for me...I prefer to keep it private.
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"I reserve the right to be completely wrong."

[Pam]

For me it's a matter of them publishing my home address which is not a smart idea for a woman living alone. So yes, it's worth it to me.
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Pam Tierney
www.pamtierneyvo.com
imdb profile http://imdb.com/name/nm1941932/

Now what did I come in here for?

[melissa eX]

I have a number of domains.
I have a business address where I get my business mail. I use an email address that I use for unimportant things - and I set up a pre- Google Voice number (Grand Central before Google bought it - it's now Google voice) just to use for the whois - In al those years - close to 10 maybe? I get a yearly snail mail at the mailbox from a company trying to get me to renew my domain registration through them. I've never gotten a call on the GV number and I hardly get any spam on the email address at all - and that spam could come from a number of sources.

Pam is right. That's why I have a business address mailbox.

[Lee Gordon]

And don't forget that even if you block your information from WHOIS, there's a good chance the address & phone number you used to set up your website(s) were also scooped up almost immediately by Dun & Bradstreet and are available in their profile of your business. So you need to contact them separately to get them to remove that information if you don't want it out there.
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[Bish]

I probably sounded quite cavalier in my earlier posts, but I certainly agree with Pam and eX that a woman alone should do everything practical to protect themselves. It's a sad, but real, necessity.

However, I honestly think that nowadays for every hole we can plug, there are ten that we can't and maintaining anonymity from someone who really wants the information is a little like trying to save The Titanic by bailing it out with a tea-cup.
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Bailey]

I can agree with Bish on the futility of plugging one hole. I try to cover my tracks when I can, but the times that I've googled myself I've been surprised at the info that is still floating around the web.
_________________
"Bailey"
a.k.a. Jim Sutton
Retired... Every day is Saturday, except Sunday.
VO-BB Member #00044 .gif" alt="W00T" border="0" />
AOVA Graduate 02/2004 ;
"Be a Voice, not an Echo."

[Lee Gordon]

And there's no way for anyone who doesn't already know you to differentiate between the accurate and inaccurate information they find. For example, according to Spokeo, I am a woman in her 60s and I live on a vacant lot.
_________________
Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice