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There's a lot of sample domains such as domain.com, mywebsite.org and suchlike used in posts. Many of these addresses actually exist (held by squatters, often enough). I always use example.com, .net, and .org, the registered IANA example domains. If I'm editing someone else's post for some other purpose, I'll also change it to use these domain names. But I wouldn't edit a post for the sole purpose of changing the sample domain names. Should I?

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    Most often you can also find other things to improve. If so, do. Aug 23, 2011 at 14:57
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    Maybe not enforce, but I think it's a very nice idea to put it in the guidelines.
    – Lars
    Aug 23, 2011 at 14:58
  • I really don't think this is important enough to enforce. I've posted answers that use the same example domain as the question for clarity's sake, and someone has edited them to use the IANA example domains. That's nice and all, but who cares? Use whatever domain names you want (unless they link to a porn site. Then you might want to fix them). But no one actually clicks on those links anyway. Aug 24, 2011 at 17:15

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This is being enforced to some degree now:

domain.com is still allowed, however. That appears to the biggest oversight on the list.

For reference, here is a meta thread on webmasters about cleaning up example domain usage with totals of the number of times different example domains are used throughout the site.

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  • "domain.com is still allowed" - According to Shog9's comment to his related answer this was blacklisted around 1-Mar-2017.
    – MrWhite
    Oct 16, 2020 at 12:32
  • However, despite Shog9's answer stating that it applies to "all sites", this does not appear to be the case. In fact, it appears to be missing from some "programming-related" sites where I would have expected it to be implemented: "Software Engineering", "Ask Ubuntu", "Code Review", "Joomla", ...?
    – MrWhite
    Oct 16, 2020 at 12:40

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