Declaring ownership in DNS

[stuartpb]

One of the key concepts in ParkedProject is the notion that a domain can be set up as a Parked Project before configuring it on ParkedProject.com, as part of the domain's registration.

However, one issue this can lead to is that, if the user who owns the domain doesn't configure it, another user can swoop in and snag the configuration.

As such, Parked Project offers two mechanisms for claiming ownership of a domain through DNS configuration. If a domain is configured with records matching either of these, it will only be configurable by the user specified in those records.

In the absence of either of these record types, domains are assigned as first-come-first-served. A domain can only be reclaimed from another user by setting up these records, then re-performing the registration.

Also, a request for a site using one of these DNS records will add that site to your user dashboard as a suggestion, similar to the way GitHub suggests making pull requests for recently pushed branches.

*.s.parkedproject.com www CNAME record

A user can set the CNAME of the www subdomain of the domain to a domain like exampleuser.s.parkedproject.com.

This isn't always possible (eg. when using a service like CloudFlare, the CNAME will be clobbered by an A record), so users can also set a TXT record.

TXT record

This should be set for the domain without www.

parkedproject-username=exampleuser

*.sns.parkedproject.com NS record

This is a hypothetical future feature that may be implemented in the far future. ParkedProject.com will, after confirming that it is the configured nameserver for the domain, direct DNS queries for your domain to the ParkedProject.com server(s).

[stuartpb]

The *.sns.parkedproject.com thing will have to be at least *.sns1.parkedproject.com and *.sns2.parkedproject.com as most configurations require at least 2 name servers.