At risk of SOUNDING insulting - which I am not - I'm being truthful - and the truth is hard for some people - and I don't apologize for that - this is only a problem for people who are amateurish enough to put a cell phone or other personal telephone number on a domain name listing.
I've had my real contact info - including telephone number - on Portlandia-it.com ever since it was registered. The phone goes to my Asterisk server which has the usual voice response unit (press 1 for X press 2 for Y, etc.) No problems whatsoever with spam calls. If you are a personal individual setting up a domain name then that is why the privacy stuff was created and your contact info is going to be "[email protected]" with a phone number of 8675309 and anyone seeing that is going to know what you are. Nothing wrong with that. The people with the complaints are the people who are individuals, and small, who are trying to pass themselves off as being something they are not. The problem isn't putting your real contact info on your whois record. That is something you MUST do to pass yourself off as "looking like a bigger company" if that is what your game is. The problem is if you are a minnow pretending to be a whale - you need to go whole-hog and get the PBX with the VRU and all the rest of it. That's what I did. And what I ended up getting sometimes was contacts from would-be clients who were the ones looking for the larger whales with the bureaucracy's that entire purpose of existence is to bow to them and jack up their self esteem. They didn't want to hear the truth about how technically impossible their idiotic demands were, either, when I told it to them. That was fun, for a while. Then it sort of got boring. It never ceases to amaze me how some people will pay 3x the money for the same service they can get from a sole proprietorship as from a larger regional organization just so they won't be "fired as a customer" from the larger organization when they start acting like jerks. PLUG is a minnow. That's not bad. Minnows can do what the F they want, and say what the F they want to anyone they want (even when the truth is inconvenient) and minnows don't have to pet and stroke people and be politically correct so someone's nose does not go out of joint. Therefore things will be easier for everyone to do what minnows do and use the proxies and their 1-800-NOT-HEAR phone numbers on registrations. It's not like they can't go to the website and send an email! Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of George Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2026 12:21 AM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] supplemental domain name Oh good. Pass that info around. It happened immediately. Scammers scrape the db for names with address and phone numbers. -gbk On Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 12:18 AM Russell Senior <[email protected]> wrote: > "whois linux.portland.or.us" has no data. > > "whois portland.or.us" leads to the org that delegated linux to us. > > On 6/10/26 00:12, George wrote: > > Uh oh. .us does not allow for an anonymous whois identity listing. > > You'll find a sharp increase in scammer telephone calls to the > > number on the listing. I had to abandon my domain .us registration > > and assign the name, address and phone number to one in Reykjavík. > > The scammer calls stopped after about a week. > > -gbk > > > > On Tue, Jun 9, 2026, 10:21 PM Russell Senior <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> I mentioned this at the PLUG meeting last week, but I will mention > >> it here as well. > >> > >> Through a series of shenanigans, we have recently come into the > >> "possession" (or delegation, if you prefer) of the domain name: > >> linux.portland.or.us. > >> > >> DNS is configured, the letsencrypt certificate is configured, and > >> the website is configured to use either: > >> > >> pdxlinux.org > >> www.pdxlinux.org > >> linux.portland.or.us > >> www.linux.portland.or.us > >> > >> And, at least for me, it seems to work. This is intended for now, > >> to be a fun experiment. Email is not configured for the new domain yet. > >> > >> Let me know if you notice anything wonky. > >> > >> -- > >> Russell Senior > >> PLUG Volunteer > >> [email protected] > >> > >
