Comment by jvuygbbkuurx
13 hours ago
Why are they so specific?
Why password-reset instead of a more generic link tree?
Why discord domain verification instead of domain-verifications with a dynamic list on entries?
Seems like a waste of time. I would just define my own spec outside of well known for my use case.
Your own spec wouldn't be used by anyone else.
The password-reset well-known endpoint is used by password managers to show a "Change password..." button in their interface, which magically links to the password change page described in that well-known file.
If the website implements it. What about email preferences? Removing account links? There are many use-cases you might want to redirect a user to, but having to make their own well known for it seems dumb instead of using a more generic one. I guess the more flexible it is, the harder adoption becomes as the usage within a spec might diverge, or it grows outside of the spec and becomes unofficial. So maybe password-reset is correct level of specification.
Anyway discord domain verification can tell in their onboarding docs to put it anywhere. It being well known does nothing. If there was a root level domain verification, then you might as well put it under that. But otherwise why go through a process?
It’s just easier for everybody to implement. Password manager opens https://<some-website>/.well-known/change-password in the user’s browser, it gets redirected to the actual page where password change form is located. You could make the password manager look it up in a link tree and then open a correct page, yes, but...
> I guess the more flexible it is, the harder adoption becomes
Yeah. If there is one account management related URL that password managers care about, it’s the change password page. You don’t really need to change email on your account that often, but it is probably a good idea to rotate your password once in a while. So I guess it’s a good idea to make it as easy as possible to adopt – which means just a single URL redirecting to another.
> If the website implements it.
That’s a good catch, though. I guess right now password managers would still have to make a “preflight” request just to see if /.well-known/change-password is implemented before showing it to the user. (But that can go away if most websites adopt it.)
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> Why discord domain verification instead of domain-verifications with a dynamic list on entries?
The TXT record itself is already a dynamic list of entries. It's far simpler and easier to iterate through the list and compare the start of each value with your search string until you find "discord domain verification" directly than it would be to do anything else.
Example:
Having all those TXT records at the domain apex like that makes the TXT query reply huge, which affects, for instance, every mail recipient who merely wants to check the SPF record. This is a bad pattern to follow.
The domains with large numbers of TXT records are also used in DNS DDoS amplification attacks. Spoofed UDP requests to domains that have a large number of TXT records are used to slam other sites. In the past I would transparently strip the TXT records when I ran public DNS recursive resolvers nobody noticed except the botters but some here may be activated. Some domains with a lot of dangling records:
Ebay used to be in first place, not sure what changed.
In unbound.conf:
after the changes:
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The better pattern is to use an underscore prefix like _discord-verification.domain.com
If your site allows user-created subdomains it shouldn't allow leading underscore. This is reserved somehow.
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"Domain-verifications" is an invitation for everyone else that might need it to use the same standard and convention. "Discord-domain-verification" is not, it's what feels like polluting the global namespace with the company name that might cease to exist in a few years.
At the very least, it should be "domain-verification-discord", "-google" and so on. Maybe even "-com.discord", "-com.google"? And the first part clearly standardized and registered, instead of one entity using "domain" and another one "site".
Why?
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Domain verifications leak information that they shouldn't - it should be "random key.domain.com in TXT randomkey"
Literally the inner platform effect. We have multiple kinds of DNS record. Let's use them instead of creating a key value store inside a key value store.
> discord domain verification
That’s on Discord. They’re not in the registry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596286]