ICANN published new Universal Acceptance guidelines this week, which reminded me of a problem from the early new-TLD days. Some websites used to reject valid extensions like .photography or .technology because their checks only recognized short TLDs. Has anyone actually seen this happen recently on a website, tool, or online service?
It's always like that, big dogs like Google or MS have already updated their validation rules, but for everyone else it's hit or miss. The same goes for non-Latin internationalized domains.
oh I'd be pleased to see that - tells you immediately that the site isn't maintained and I don't need to bother with their results.
The IDN side is probably where the gaps show up fastest. Some sites accept the domain itself, then reject the exact same string in an email field. Ha, true. If a domain-related tool still rejects a valid TLD, that says more about the tool than the domain.
As someone who holds a few domains on newer extensions, I can confirm this still happens, just less than it did around 2016-2018. It's almost never Google or the big platforms anymore, which lines up with what qwikad said -- it's the smaller tools, CRM signup forms, and the occasional checkout page where the real gaps are. The email-field inconsistency nicenic mentioned is the one I've run into most recently: a site will accept the domain in one field and then reject the exact same string as an email address, which is a pretty clear sign the validators were built at different times. And I agree with sarahk that it's basically a maintenance tell -- especially when a tool's entire job is domains and it still chokes on a valid one.
Thanks, this is useful. Any chance you remember which CRM or checkout did that? I’d like to test a few newer TLDs and IDNs there too.