[pastage]

Seems like the TXT record creator fails to escape `. I can not find anything about money/licensing on there.

I love DNS, and terse text formats, but both are pretty arcane for most people. You might as well have people post compressed base85 encoded messages or something similar. I will use this but will the thai on the corner, probably not.

[elliottinvent]

In MODL [1] graves are used to quote strings since DNS implementations vary in how they handle escaped double quotes. That said, the record editor should have escaped it if you entered it into an input field so I'll take a look at this, thanks for highlighting it.

We're united in our love for DNS and terse text formats and I agree that most people don't care about either. However, that's the point of the NUM Server service [2] – it's a front end to create and manage NUM records.

Early next year we're going to populate the DNS with millions of NUM records for businesses based on their company website. So once the data is in DNS and developers start to consume it and build interesting things with it, we hope that companies will want to claim their record and that's where we can make money – from NUM record hosting, as protocol adoption grows.

Licensing for all NUM libraries is Apache 2.0, there's no charge or limitations on records from our NUM Server service, we just ask that a link is provided where a business can claim their populated record.

1. https://www.modl.uk 2. https://app.numserver.com

[maaarghk]

I feel the same way, the record editor is pretty esoteric and reminds me of schema.org really. For any hope of adoption by small business I think it needs to be something registrars buy into with a more user-focused interface which is more like "describe your business to us" than "populate our data format". Large corps, DNS is surprisingly often managed by marketing departments, and you're going to find them asking questions like "so we can't advertise our complementary services to someone looking for our phone number? we can't style it? Why would we want that? We can't track conversion?" All of these are probably positives to the user, but in direct conflict with the interests of the people actually in control of the domain.

edit/ of course the only way around this is for apple and google to make it mandatory to appear in their mobile dialer app or something, but google at least will never do that because in the "way things are" example we can see many, many user-unfriendly situations that are great for google's metrics and revenue

[elliottinvent]

> the record editor is pretty esoteric and reminds me of schema.org really.

This is our first version of the record editor and it'll get much more user-friendly over time. I agree that our module system has some similaries with schema.org, I think what's lacking with structured data formats for the web is a simple way that a small business can adopt the technology. That's what we're trying to offer with the NUM Server – fill in a simple form and we take care of publishing the data.

> For any hope of adoption by small business I think it needs to be something registrars buy into with a more user-focused interface which is more like "describe your business to us" than "populate our data format"

We're about to build in an integration with GoDaddy and 1&1 (IONOS) – this will make it easy for domain registrants to delegate their independent NUM zone (_num.example.com) to the NUM Server. Longer term, registrars might want registrants to build NUM records using tools offered by the registrars. In my opinion, registrars have historically done a pretty bad job of making tools user-friendly and I'm sure we can do a better job.

> Large corps, DNS is surprisingly often managed by marketing departments

This is an interesting point. I've never known of a reliable DNS zone for a large corporation being managed by a marketing department but with more and more services requiring DNS verification records this is becoming more and more common. We actually have a module to address that point – the Custodians module [1]

> ... you're going to find them asking questions like "so we can't advertise our complementary services to someone looking for our phone number? we can't style it? Why would we want that? We can't track conversion?" All of these are probably positives to the user, but in direct conflict with the interests of the people actually in control of the domain.

With the contacts module a company can advertise a range of methods (e.g. social media) alongside their telephone number but you're right they're not in control of how developers use the data or display it. I think this is something companies have already gotten used to – they're not in charge of how Facebook, Google or Yelp display their data. At least with NUM they're in control of the data itself.

We see user anonymity and the absence of tracking (from the resolver to the authoritative server at least) as a big plus point for NUM and a step in the right direction.

I think Twitter is a great example of a technology which would seem to be at odds with a company's goals: (i) complaints for the world to see; (ii) dealing with customer service by Tweet with restricted characters!; (iii) anonymity of users. But businesses use it because users love it.

I really appreciate the feedback.

1: https://www.numprotocol.com/specification#example-modules