The end of .zip

I wonder if they are mainly doing this to stop the piracy in some ways.

What's the point for Google having all those top level domains? Are they actually used for anything? I can't remember seeing any of them in action.

This thread was most written out of annoyance at seeing "doom.zip" get autolinked to a nonexistent website, plus the fact that Google specifically refused to crawl the idgames database pages with a .zip extension. I don't think things are really particularly dire.

That said, since Google is going to be operating the .zip TLD, I have to wonder if they're going to set it up so all requests to a nonexistent whatever.zip domain get redirected to a Google search page for that term...

What is even the purpose of this? Are they fucking mad? As a tech company, they should know better than this.

Working around it won't be terribly difficult, but why create the inconvenience in the first place?

Wow things keep threatening to destroy the doom community this year... we should probably mention that during the next cacowards.

So we're talking about the zip file, not the actual zip you get on trousers? Phew, I almost lost it for a second.

Jon said:

or .xz that has better than 7z, or.... perhaps compression rate isn't the most important factor. (decompression *speed* is often pretty important too. And compatibility.)

Hmmm? .xz and .7z both can use the same compression algorithm (LZMA/LZMA2)

XZ is LZMA2, 7z is a container format that can use LZMA2 as well as other algorithms such as DEFLATE (it's like Zip in this way).

Sodaholic said:

What is even the purpose of this? Are they fucking mad? As a tech company, they should know better than this.

Working around it won't be terribly difficult, but why create the inconvenience in the first place?

Because they're cunts with more money than sense.

Guess I'm moving to .zdm and .gzd from now on. Fuck corporations.

Well I know I hate the idea of .zip as a domain name. Just like I'll hate .mp3 .wav and .wad as domain names.

Now that's just fucking stupid, Google. That will break a LOT of domain links linking to ZIP files all over the internet and not just /idgames/.

Now I wish that back when domains were first started, something else than a period was used right before the domain. Then it wouldn't matter if domains shared the same letters as common filetypes.

Do people even use anything besides .com, .org or .net? They have been working just fine since the begining of the internet. Creating those new ones seems kind of pointless.

Silly google. I wonder how Winzip feels about all this? lol

did you know about .wiki domain? it was made available a year ago. well, not doom.zip, but doom.wiki!

Glaice said:

That will break a LOT of domain links linking to ZIP files all over the internet and not just /idgames/.

All it breaks is the Google search it seems, and that's their own decision, not a technical limitation. Maybe they just don't want to index zip files and it could be unrelated to the domain. Do they actually index rar, 7z, tar, exe etc files? There are dedicated file search engines for that.
I don't see it breaking any links. Every parser knows what part of an URL is the top level domain.
After all, the internet didn't break any com files either.

HorrorMovieGuy said:

Do people even use anything besides .com, .org or .net?

Of course. Most of the two letter country codes are in heavy use. See the idgames mirrors for some examples.

Just tested: nic.zip redirects to Google registry, so that domain is online already.

ABRACADABRA said:

did you know about .wiki domain? it was made available a year ago. well, not doom.zip, but doom.wiki!

I proposed that a while ago, Quasar said no, he's worried about the impact on search engine ranking. Although I like how simple it is, I don't like the idea of lining some corporate pockets for a vanity name.

That's just stupid to use zip as an actual website domain name. Did it not occur to them that that's a very popular file format? If someone puts .zip as part of the url, it'll confuse people and they'll think it's redirecting them to a zip file.

Ling just go make supercomputers or something, holy shit.

Now this is just confusing to me. Google is always so fucking confusing. Ever since that Google+ crap with YouTube they've always confused me.

I'm gonna try and see what I can learn from this, if I can.

Yes, I believe this to be a conspiracy.

let them figure it out, like we all did.

Avoozl said:

I wonder if they are mainly doing this to stop the piracy in some ways.

i love buying hard copies of my favorite games, but you wont see me installing drm crap on my computer.

from the old days where you had to have cd in the drive, to securom, to steam, its all bullshit.

i think a big chunk of "piracy" is really people deciding for themselves what will and will not be installed on their personal computer.

Time to purchase the .zip domains for any WAD I decide to make, haha.

If references to websites are used rather than just URLs (i.e. a non-linked doomworld.com) gets counted as a reference in search results. Popular ZIP names which also happen to be the same as a domain name would end up really high on the list. However some software (Twitter I suppose) automatically takes words and determines if they point to a domain or not, so that would also increase their rank. Now imagine someone is having a conversation about "doom1.zip" (installing shareware, etc.) which then suddenly becomes a link to a website at http://doom1.zip/ and then that leads to some screwed up shock site or similar. You could be banned from Twitter for posting links to said site.

On another note, perhaps Oracle should get the ".jar" TLD.

I think it should be grabbed by a reggae record label