You no longer need DNS to prove a studio is yours

Eleven studios started the process of proving ownership of their domain.

Not one completed it.

That was enough to tell us something was wrong.

Until now, No Man Site offered the two conventional ways of proving control of a website: add a DNS record or place a verification file on the server.

Both methods work.

Both methods were also asking the wrong person to do the work.

So we have added a third option.

You can now verify a studio through an operational mailbox on its own domain.

No DNS change. No server file.

The person managing the profile is rarely managing the DNS

When we looked at the people starting verification, the pattern became obvious.

They were signing up with addresses such as:

seo@…

orm@…

sales@…

These are perfectly reasonable people to maintain a studio's public profile.

They are also usually not the people with access to the domain registrar, DNS zone or production server.

The old process therefore turned a simple action into an internal company task.

Someone in marketing had to find whoever controlled the domain. That person had to understand what No Man Site was, log in to infrastructure they quite reasonably treat with care, add a record or upload a file, and then wait for verification.

For a directory or register the technical colleague may never have heard of.

The security model was sound.

The product experience was not.

Verification by domain email

There is now another route.

Choose one of the available service mailboxes on your domain — for example:

admin@

webmaster@

info@

We send a verification message to that address.

Open it, follow the verification action, and the domain is confirmed.

The important part is where the message goes.

You cannot verify somebody else's domain by entering your own email address. The verification message is sent to an address belonging to the domain being claimed.

For the purpose of maintaining a studio profile, access to an operational mailbox on that domain gives us the evidence we need without forcing users to make an infrastructure change.

DNS and file verification remain available for anyone who prefers them.

Less friction, same principle

We did not add email verification because DNS was technically wrong.

We added it because a technically perfect process that almost nobody completes is a bad product.

There is also a wider lesson here for No Man Site.

Studios are not usually represented by one person who controls everything.

The designer maintaining the profile may not control hosting.

The marketing team may not control DNS.

The founder may not know where the server is.

The developer may have no interest in maintaining directory listings.

A good verification process has to respect the way real organisations work.

Now it does.

You can prove the domain using infrastructure if you want to.

Or you can prove it through the domain's own mailbox and get back to the work you actually came here to do.