-Ed

Someone has been very interested in my domain as of late I guess and I got these google alerts for url appraisal and other things as well as a Whois search. But anyway I realized that there was all my personal information just splashed up on a page for anyone to find. I'm a private person and I don't want my home address and everything else accessible because someone searches my domain..but it's required to be accessible.

Anyway, to make a long story short I went ahead and purchased a private domain option through Godaddy. That uses a "domain by proxy" service. You still have complete control over your domain it's just that they come up as the information.

I don't know how this works for other domain services but for godaddy it was as simple as choosing to make the domain private and then paying for it. I already checked and it worked immediately. My info was there one minute and gone the next.

This may not be important to anyone but me but I thought I'd bring it up! Your email and everything is searchable this way.

We'll make the /noredirect/true option work to disable the "Use the custom domain as the only domain for this site" option on a page.

Does checking "Use the custom domain as the only domain for this site." cause problems in this situation or does yoursite.wikidot.com still work?

-Ed

Good question, and something I'd also like to have an answer to if possible.

If it does cause problems, then a simple workaround would be to prevent a page from using the "Use the custom domain as the only domain for this site" setting if it has the ManageSite module on it.

You rock.

only when i'm feeling insecure :-)
_(often)

-Ed

do you remember what it was called?
because that will get you there

The wiki is listed under my account, but there is no way to manage it.Is there a way to configure a different domain.

what are the advantages/disadvantages to having "Use the custom domain as the only domain for this site" checked?

What it says on the admin page: requests to the .wikidot.com site name will get redirected to the custom domain.

I guess I just had to wait…a lesson in patience!

@pierterh, what are the advantages/disadvantages to having "Use the custom domain as the only domain for this site" checked?

Thanks in advance.

You should find that anyone going to a wikidot page now gets redirected properly to turnersips.ca.

-Pieter
Wikidot Inc.

http://turnerstips.ca/answers

I never received any error messages but….I am still stuck with …..".wikidot.com" and the end of every page.

How long should I wait for the changes? (I know it depends on various factors but how long is TOO long?)

My site is www.turnerstips.ca

Thanks in advance!

Basically you can use DNS names for subdomains but not for domains. This is a DNS thing, not Wikidot. So let's say you register example.com. You can set-up a number of "DNS records", including an A (host 'address') record that provides an IP address for a name. You always have an A record for a host name and it must always specify an IP address, not a name.

Which gives us a DNS entry like this:

 @ 10800 IN A 67.228.37.26 

And many web clients will try to make this more friendly. The '@' stands for 'the hostname', thus example.com. The 10800 is the timeout (time-to-live) which specifies how long this DNS entry is cached by servers between you and example.com.

Next, we can define subdomains like 'www.example.com' and 'blog.example.com'. You can define these either using address records, or using canonical name (CNAME) records.

A CNAME record refers to another DNS name, which can be 'wikidot.com' or 'www.wikidot.com' (these are equivalent here). So:

 blog 10800 IN CNAME www.wikidot.com. www 10800 IN CNAME www.wikidot.com. 

This is, again, the raw DNS record format. Most web interfaces try to make it simpler for you.

So, what does this mean for your custom domain?

• If you want to use the hostname (example.com) you must define an A record that points to Wikidot's IP address
• If you want to use a subdomain (www.example.com) you can define a CNAME record that points to www.wikidot.com

One way for Wikidot to solve this problem is to simply ban the use of hostnames. Other services do this but I find it annoying because it means when people type the hostname without 'www' they land on whatever web site the actual A record points to.

Tell me if this helps. I'll write up the article now.

I am still curious as to the reason the DNS name can't be provided. It would make it all so simpler. Is it a security issue? Or is there maybe the server runs on a different operating system than the servers I generally use?