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According to this, example.com is now the "preferred" example domain and should be used over other domains. Those other domains are blacklisted and aren't allowed in new posts.

Currently, though, there's a user that's going through the posts with "site.com", etc. in them and changing it to example.com. This is often the only change.

I've been rejecting them as too minor, but they often get approved, causing me to second guess myself. Take for example this one.

Should these edits be approved or rejected?

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    Approve, improve, do whatever you have to, but don't leave links to xxx.com unchanged!
    – michaelb958--GoFundMonica
    Mar 26, 2014 at 4:18
  • @michael Most of these aren't xxx.com, that was just an example. And they aren't links, per se, but examples in code blocks. But yeah, a real link to such a site should be edited out.
    – Undo
    Mar 26, 2014 at 4:20
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    The linked question specifically asks to disallow "site.com". Shog9's answer backs this up.
    – Matthew Lundberg
    Mar 26, 2014 at 4:28

3 Answers 3

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example.com is now the "preferred" example domain and should be used over other domains.

Well, it's been the "preferred" example domain for well over a decade, predating Stack Overflow by a fair bit.

Regardless, you really don't need a special rule for these. Does the edit make the post better? Easier to understand? Then approve it. Is it making the post worse? Is it pointless busywork on a doomed post? Reject it.

Your example edit wasn't particularly necessary (the URL wasn't hyperlinked) but arguably made a decent post slightly easier to understand. I wouldn't bother making that edit myself unless I was already editing a post, but I wouldn't go out of my way to block it either.

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    I honestly didn't realize there was a good bit of work involved in approving edits. I'm looking into some of the methods in answers here and focusing on those that accidently link to questionable content for a professional site like SO. I do want to contribute, but don't want to burden a review queue.
    – jdphenix
    Mar 27, 2014 at 6:04
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Shog9's answer, https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/207155/244933, specifically says that he has blacklisted "site.com".

Thus, while it seems to be minor change, it shouldn't be rejected as too minor.

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    Relevant quote from somewhere I can't remember: "A lot of folks seem to miss the "too" in "too minor"."
    – michaelb958--GoFundMonica
    Mar 26, 2014 at 4:33
  • Ok, so if someone wants to edit a post with 'site.com' in it, they'll have to change that too. But these edits are only that.
    – doppelgreener
    Mar 26, 2014 at 4:34
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I would reject them.

If this automatic thoughtless edit was considered worthwhile then a script would have been run on the database to do this change. The lack of such a script shows that the change does not have much benefit.

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    Automating this is a little bit tricky since there are false positives - ideally, we'd have a link-checker that could intelligently nab these, but that's kinda stuck in limbo.
    – Shog9
    Mar 26, 2014 at 15:21
  • @Shog9, link:xxx.com site:stackoverflow.com on google gives 70K results, if only 10% of these hit the edit queue, it is sill 7K items to be processed!
    – Ian Ringrose
    Mar 26, 2014 at 15:37
  • This search is more accurate: stackoverflow.com/search?q=url%3Axxx.com - there are more that aren't linked but those aren't so critical. Well under 70K in either case.
    – Shog9
    Mar 26, 2014 at 15:40
  • @Shog9, why is Google finding so many more?
    – Ian Ringrose
    Mar 26, 2014 at 15:43
  • Because Google tries to be clever. Go a few pages in and look at what's getting highlighted in the excerpts - you start seeing things like "xxxMethod detected ... share a link to this question ..."
    – Shog9
    Mar 26, 2014 at 16:10

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