I do agree that a reactive blocker is better than nothing, but I would prefer a proactive one because of privacy considerations.
But then again, it’s not too difficult to go into dev tools and remove them, assuming I’m on a PC and the ad has its own element (IE: not YouTube).
Nowadays, most advertising is CPM based. Most websites make the majority of the revenue from just showing ads, not just people clicking the ads. After all, even if you don’t click on the ad, you will still see the brand name and message, which might make you more likely to engage with that brand later on.
Advertisers are not stupid and they are not launching ad campaigns to provide anonymous donations to website owners. So there is quite a bit of scrutiny to make sure that ads are not just loaded, but are also visible.
Different people have different reasons to block ads (the privacy and security arguments being very important of course). But even if this were to catch on, I expect we’ll either get an arms race to detect whether ads are hidden, or just a reduction in CPM rates to account for the loss of revenue from the hidden ads. In either case, the ad blocker user wins and everyone else loses.
mechanical and electronic security is one of my hobbies so I let out a huge sigh when I saw this
Got Firefox on my college laptop, but I think I’ll stick with chrome on my main PC for now. That will change as soon as I start to see adblock being affected by Manifest V3/some other crap that Chrome pushes.
That chatbot option sounds interesting though…
Today is a really strange day 
Everyone is confused or misinterpreting the information (including me)
Some people scatter coins in front of the cash register
the shopkeeper says that this has already happened several times to others today
I can’t log in to Instagram via PC because the cookie-related popup doesn’t work when any button is clicked (do you accept or reject)
luckily I edited the HTML and bypassed the popup and logged in
but many others have problems with login and other things on Instagram
What are your experiences related to today regarding “something strange in the air” ?
The admin experienced today’s crazy day 
, only I don’t know privately if he noticed that something is wrong with everyone today
I’m starting to thing that there is some terrible UX issue somewhere.
Removing the ability to create a new hosting account with a custom domain seems to have many people establish “welp, I guess I can’t add my own domain name here, let’s just use an “invisible redirect”/“URL forward” [or whatever their domain provider calls this thing that’s not actually a redirect/forward] instead” and then complain it doesn’t work well.
And that case where you tell someone “check the domains list” and they respond with “are these .htaccess lines correct”.
People uploading their website to the htdocs folder while their domain is not pointing to the htdocs folder has basically always been a thing, but it feels to me like it’s getting worse.
Is the domains menu that well hidden? Should the domains list be displayed more prominently? Or is the information in it just unclear?
It’s not like creating an account with a subdomain first is unusual. ByetHost has this, 000webhost had this, and most other free hosting services that offer free subdomains do this.
When they don’t understand the connection between the domain and some folder there and what the consequences are if it is deleted, renamed, etc.
They have the impression that it’s all like on a computer where you delete a folder if you don’t need it right now to free up disk space.
The whole hosting system is complex and has a lot of small hidden rules that are only learned after months here
Perhaps separate critical things and simply hide them from the user
Prevent users from deleting or renaming critical folders
With me it’s the other way around, I can’t delete several folders from the ex-domains because the system doesn’t allow me, and it allows users in cases where it’s undesirable.
The first confusion is because at the first creation, the hosting acc files go to htdocs, when another domain is added, then a problem arises because they are used to looking only for htdocs and stuffing files into it instead of "yourdomain/htdocs"
There is simply no uniformity - where you would apply the acquired routine again, but you have to use the “exception” and learn that too…
and so exception after exception
case: 1
case: 2
case: 3
etc.
instead of
If
Else
the end
I do have to say that at least personally, I feel like the platform has gotten harder to use for new users.
In the past, you always talked about how having a menu of options was too confusing for people, and they did not understand how to find what they were looking for. I think you were right back then, and it still holds true today. Especially on mobile, it is much more difficult to find anything, or modify anything on your account without opening the menu bar, which some people probably assume is the main menu, not the account editor menu.
Removing the option to add a custom domain at account creation is also a change I disagree with (but you do what you want to do, I have no power outside of this forum anyways) as it makes it too confusing for people. You advertise custom domain support, then make it hard to add it. Yes, you have the custom domains can be added later message, but once the account is created it’s not clear how to actually go about adding the domain.
Also, when you first started doing it, I though migrating all the control panel features into the CA was a good idea (And I know we’ve talked regarding this before), but I’m starting to think it’s not as good of an idea anymore. Unless the client area implementation of it is better (like bypassing weird requirements for URLs and such that the vP has), why duplicate it and add another menu option that makes it harder to people to find what they are looking for?
Take databases for an example: having a PHPMyAdmin button in the CA makes sense (Even though it’s kind of annoying since it requires a second screen to choose a database to login to), but having the ability to create / remove databases really is not needed (that’s what the control panel is for, right? To control the website?). If it makes things easier, add it to the CA, but there needs to be a better balance between what is actually commonly used and is useful, and what is just taking up space and really belongs in the vP.
When I’m making UI updates/changes, I try and put myself into my self 6 years ago (or somewhere around there) when I started using this platform. What did I like? What did I not? But more importantly, what did I know, what did I find confusing, and what made things easy?
(And I am by no means not an expert, but hopefully my own platform and pretty low ratio of users to UI issues can speak to the fact that I do kind of know what I am doing, some of the time anyways )
Those are just my thoughts and comments, feel free to ignore them or ask questions about them.
While this is true, I think that the publicity of people struggling with it might play a role. While both of those platforms technically have community support forums, said forums aren’t quite as… prominent as what you’ve built here. If you take a look at the “Free Hosting General” category of iFastNet’s community forum, the latest new thread is from August 31st of this year. If you sort by newest first, you only have to go four down before finding one from July 23rd. They may have customers who struggle with that who just give up rather than asking for help from the community, though I admit that’s only speculation.
Part of it might also be the fact that you’ve successfully made getting started seem so much easier, that it’s attracting more first-time webmasters. Or, maybe they only have experience with cPanel, which is what vPanel’s front-facing design is meant to mimic. I could see someone used to the addon domains page in cPanel getting confused with the InfinityFree client area. Greenreader makes a good point on that I think:
It also probably doesn’t help that a lot of premium hosting providers give you the option to add a custom domain at sign-up. Granted this is free hosting and expectations should be different, but if someone who wants to start a website is told by their more experienced friend “this is how it usually works” I could see why the deviation would throw them off track (Not to mention they do it that way so using a custom domain is easier). InfinityFree had that option for a moment but removed it. Yes, the client area does say you can add one later, but I know from my experience in customer service that many customers are great at missing things that have to be read like that, especially in the tech industry.
On that note, I’ve actually been curious about why it was removed. I remember you mentioning that it was done to “reduce friction”…
…if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly does that mean? Was it simply causing extra stress on the server and iFastNet told you to remove it, or was there something else going on?
Thank you all for the replies! I really appreciate the feedback!
There has been some flip-flopping over the years when it comes to making it possible to delete critical folders.
When creating a new site, all is good with protected folders. But when deleting a domain, what are you supposed to do? Should we:
I recently saw some panel, I think it was custom, always setup domain specific directories, and simply created a symlink from public_html/www to the directory of the initial domain. That’s a lot better than the cPanel model where multi domain support feels like an afterthought.
Still, this is probably a hard sell for iFastNet, both because it’s more difficult to implement and because they want to stay closer to the cPanel model.
I’m also struggling with how to present it well. Talking about making menus simple is easy when you don’t have a lot of functionality yet.
At this point, having the control panel button visible so prominently is more out of historic reasons than out of functional necessity, because every single feature available in the control panel is also available in the client area (albeit slightly differently usually).
I do stand by that many of the client area implementations are better than the VistaPanel implementations. The client area SSL/TLS menu nicely integrates with the Free SSL feature, and the Redirects and Protected Directories features are just more versatile than the VP counterparts.
Hopping back and forth between the control panel and the client area for specific features seems like an even more confusing mess than the current situation.
I really think that there are more sensible options to make these features accessible than cPanel’s “here is a grid of 50 icons, now you go figure out what you need and what they do”. But I haven’t really seen that many examples of panels that really do it well.
By “reducing friction”, I had hoped to make it easier for users. This is twofold:
Firstly, setting up an account should be simple, fast and easy. If you want to host a custom domain, then having to first update your nameservers, wait a day, and then try creating the account again, seemed like a frustrating road block.
Yes, I know that with premium hosting, this is normal. However, those 1) don’t require the domain to be setup beforehand and 2) can then try to sell you a domain name along with the hosting account so you can pay for them together. When you don’t sell domains and don’t have a payment step, it changes the context a lot.
The other issue is feature parity with adding domains later. When adding domains later on, you can choose between CNAME verification and nameserver verification. But during the account creation stage, you can only only verify by setting nameservers. Especially for those who can’t do nameserver verification, that’s not a nice way to find out. Having only one way to add custom domains where you have all the options seems like a cleaner way to do it.
As I’ve been writing and contemplating this, I have gotten some ideas on how to improve this. Displaying the domains list more prominently could help, but also perhaps creating a “pseudo control panel” with a different menu structure could work.
But how would that fix
In any case, I disagree with the second point. Look at WHMCS/cPanel. You can do the bare basics in WHMCS, and control everything from cPanel. Yes, cPanel is not the best, but the structure and relationship it has with client areas is a good one.
The AI slightly reshaped and shortened my text
Implementing a Grace Period for Deleted Domains
Overview
A proposed method to implement a grace period before permanently deleting a domain, allowing for data recovery and compliance with legal requirements.
Key Points
Benefits
If I understood you correctly, it means that there are no more htdocs, but some folder with the domain name like yourdomain.com becomes the domain root and files and other things immediately go inside ?
What is the situation with Softaculous… if there would be any changes in this regard?
That seems good to me and is a more uniform behavior 
I strongly disagree with you there. I hate the disjointed experience between WHMCS and cPanel, and I think both have terrible UX. Having one interface to manage everything, without having multiple completely different panels for different parts of the product (segregating domains, hosting and billing)
When I still used WHMCS, I saw many support requests for very basic things like how to access cPanel, where to find the nameservers, how to link domains to accounts, etc. So I really don’t think WHMCS is what we should strive for.
With a WHMCS host, you can purchase a domain name, add it to a hosting account, and then it doesn’t work. Why? Because you manually need to update the nameservers, and nothing tells you that anywhere. With an integrated panel, you could detect the domain registration and offer to update the settings automatically.
That’s where the “pseudo” part comes in. I’m not saying the control panel should be a completely separate application, just a different section in the same panel. Maybe with some visual cues to tell it apart from the main interface, and a different main menu so it’s easier to access the specific control panel features.
It’s an interesting idea that’s a compromise between deleting and not deleting. However:
Not necessarily, we could keep the example.com/htdocs structure for addon domains. Sure, you could remove the htdocs directory, but it’s not necessary.
The main difference is for initial domains. Right now, if you create an account for the domain example.rf.gd, the domain is linked to the htdocs folder. With this change the initial domain would get linked to the folder example.rf.gd/htdocs. That way, there is no special status for initial domains. And as a bonus: if you delete the initial domain and add it again, you don’t need to move your website files.
Optionally, we could setup a symlink from htdocs to example.rf.gd/htdocs, so people with a single domain can just go to “the htdocs folder” and just drop everything in there.
Thumbs up for this. This should reduce up to 80% of the 404 hosting support request 
Especially for this scenario
Well people do seem to be getting dumber 
or to call htdocs like this example.rf.gd/upload-files-here
Btw. one question - why the main .htaccess file is not simply hidden from the users? if they don’t see it, nobody will even edit it.
This one seems to have given up because his subdomain is dead
@KangJL I don’t remember asking you…are those freenom domains that they “gave you” still working for you?