Domain data provider takes steps to eliminate abusive and auto generated accounts.
DomainTools is taking steps to remove abusive and auto-generated accounts that use its service, company CEO Tim Chen announced on the company’s blog today.
Chen explained that the company had previously been lax about closing accounts unless they leaked valuable data or affected site operation. It was concerned about false positives (shutting down legitimate accounts).
But apparently it has hit a tipping point, as the company decided to clean up what it views as abusive and auto-generated accounts.
“By pruning abusive accounts we strive to maintain the highest levels of service availability and query speed that our users and members deserve,” Chen wrote.
Users who feel their accounts were closed in error can contact MemberServices (at) DomainTools (dot) com to rectify the problem.
[Editor’s note: The headline of this story was changed to replace “deletes” with “suspends” to better reflect the action DomainTools has taken. Accounts can still be restored.]
Just to be clear, we did not ‘delete’ any accounts. We blocked what appear to be clear cases of abuse, but we can easily re-instate anyone who was wrongly affected. I believe all the accounts were free Novice accounts, not paying members. I should have made that clear in the blog post.
Tim – so they were suspended?
DT has controls in place requiring a human response after so many checks.
DT is complaining about a few people pounding away at DT’s database?
It is amazing that registrars and registries are not complaining about DT pounding their databases and capturing the data for free which they are reselling. Which I believe is a violation of TOS with all registrars and registries.