why manually approving reverse dns is a good idea

[ComputerTrophy]

We make rDNS manual in order to prevent people from abusing the system. Not many people ask for rDNS changes anyway, and it usually turns out that they're starting a shared hosting company under our VPSs, or they want rDNS just to make their records look good.

 

[Gary]

We care about IRC usage that may be problematic (children picking fights with other children).  The attitude portrayed in, "that.stupid.bitch.got.0wned.us" for example, does not reflect the attitude of our target audience.  You see: people with that attitude, tend to attract DDoS attacks by picking fights.  Having to mitigate DDoS attacks caused by children removes available resources for mitigating DDoS attacks against things actually worth mitigating DDoS attacks against.  Yeah, I said that too.  And, I stand by it.

Don't like it?  Feel free to take your business elsewhere.

If you want to school me on "how IRC works" I should mention that I have code in basically every major IRCd and many mainstream IRC clients (the only exception coming to mind would be mIRC, actually), and wrote one of the two mainstream services implementations from scratch.  I think I know how to tell what IRC users I don't want to deal with.  Is it a form of profiling?  You betcha.  But, you see, it works... and I have over a decade of experience dealing with high-risk IRC users.  Be glad I'm willing to deal with them at all.

Right, it's individuals, rather than anything related to the protocol. Those same individuals would attract negative attention if they were running a forum, a game server or anything else.

Asking for a reverse dns for a vanity host doesn't imply bad behaviour though. Perhaps you just attract the wrong type of customer?

 

[kaniini]

Right, it's individuals, rather than anything related to the protocol. Those same individuals would attract negative attention if they were running a forum, a game server or anything else.

Asking for a reverse dns for a vanity host doesn't imply bad behaviour though. Perhaps you just attract the wrong type of customer?

You are implying that we deny reverse DNS requests on a regular basis.  We do not, and nothing I have said in this thread indicates we do.

I am not sure where you got that idea... we only deny reverse DNS in certain circumstances, such as when the domain is registered with clearly false information (which, association with a fradulent domain is an indicator of fraud... hello?), the server has software installed on it that is typically used for abuse (such as PowerMTA), or the rDNS request is in some other way abusive.

We're not disallowing setting your rDNS to something reasonable, like the hostname of the server, or even some non-tasteless vanity RDNS.  We just use user behaviour (such as what they ask for their RDNS to be, what they have installed, etc.) as an indicator of potential issues.  And, really, any host that says they're not is lying or grossly incompetent.