[44net] Update re: subdomains

Dear 44Net community, It’s been just over two months since we launched the new Portal. It came with, as you have seen, some major bumps. Today, ARDC is resolving, at least temporarily, one of those hurdles: administrative access to subdomains. As of today, anyone who had a subdomain with ampr.org before the launch of the new Portal on April 3, 2024, will, for now, have full access to their DNS records. This includes subdomains that fall outside of our preferred format of callsign.ampr.org. This administrative access still depends on call sign verification, which requires confirming given name, family name, email, and valid amateur radio license. This step helps us ensure that the network is being used by valid amateur radio operators. During our recent work, we’ve found several bad actors, which is both unfair to the community and a security risk. We’ve also made a functional change to the portal: once a call sign is verified, you are now automatically able to create a subdomain with the format of callsign.ampr.org. All other new requests for subdomains that fall outside of that format (e.g., foo.ampr.org, which I’ll refer to as nonstandard subdomains for brevity) will require review and approval. Please note that we will be limiting the number of nonstandard subdomains going forward. Thus, if you have one (or, in some cases, many more), please consider it temporary. You can currently create as many second-level subdomains as you want—e.g., foo.callsign.ampr.org, bar.callsign.ampr.org, etc. We are working on a more official policy around subdomains using ampr.org. As promised at the recent regional coordinators' meeting, we will ensure you can see this policy before officially implementing it. We will also provide a transition period, likely many months, for users to edit their entries before official deprecation. This is, ultimately, what we should have done initially, and we take responsibility for not following a better process and, instead, rolling out this change without taking proper preparatory steps. Some of you may be wondering why we are making this change in the first place. It is because, without doing so, we end up in our current and very unwieldy situation: a database of over 51,000 DNS entries, most without knowledge of who they belong to, accumulated over at least a decade, with very few entries currently in use. If we aim to increase the usage of 44Net, then we need a system where we understand ownership and are able to provide an efficient service where we can address problems as they arise. For now, we hope that this helps to unblock anyone that currently feels blocked, while also providing an ample notice for changes that are coming down the pipeline at a later, though likely not-so-distant date. If you have questions, please ask. Many thanks, Rosy -- Rosy Schechter - KJ7RYV Executive Director Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) ardc.net