Handles and addresses

What a handle is

Every Lynkur member has one handle, and it is the whole of their address: lynkur.com/eric. Their events sit under it too — lynkur.com/eric/atlanta-cpo-dinner-sep-2026 — so the handle is part of every link they hand out.

Handles are 3 to 30 characters, lowercase letters and numbers with single hyphens between them. No dots, no underscores, no accents. Two handles cannot differ only by punctuation or by the characters people mistake for one another: eric-weitz, ericweitz and er1c-we1tz are treated as the same name, because at a glance they are.

A handle is permanent

Once a handle has been held, it is never released — not when someone changes it, and not when they close their account. Nobody else can ever take it.

This is a deliberate choice, and it costs us names. The alternative is worse: if an abandoned handle went back into circulation, whoever picked it up would inherit every link, QR code and saved contact pointing at the person who had it before. Addresses people have written down have to keep meaning what they meant.

You can change your handle three times, and at most once every 30 days. Your previous addresses keep working permanently — they forward to wherever you are now, so nothing you have already sent out breaks.

Names we hold back

Some names cannot be claimed from the signup form. There are six reasons:

The last one also covers the shapes a name hides in. If stripe is held back, so are stripe-inc, getstripe and stripe-official.

We reserve a company’s name as it is normally written, not fragments of it. morganstanley is held back; morgan is not, because people are called Morgan. Where a brand and an ordinary name are the same word, we would rather let a person have it and settle the rare conflict by hand than turn away everyone who shares it.

Asking for a name we hold back

Write to handles@lynkur.com and tell us the handle you want and who you are. If you are claiming a company name, the fastest thing you can send is proof you control the matching domain — we will ask you to add a DNS record or put a file on the site, because that is something only the company can do. An email address at the domain is not enough on its own; thousands of people have one.

We aim to reply within five working days. We keep a written record of every decision, including the ones we turn down.

Claiming a handle someone else holds

If a Lynkur member is using your company’s name, or presenting themselves as you, write to the same address with the handle and what the problem is.

What happens next:

• We look at what the page actually says. Someone whose name genuinely is Tiffany, using it as their own name, is not impersonating Tiffany & Co. Someone using the same handle with the company’s logo and a sales pitch is.
• We contact the member. They get to answer before anything happens to their account.
• If we release the handle, the old address still forwards. The member keeps everything they had; their links keep working. Nobody loses a Lynkur over a name.

We are not a court. Where two people have a real claim to the same name and neither is pretending to be the other, we will leave it with whoever has it and tell you so plainly.

Verified accounts

We do not show a verification badge, and we have no plans to. Confirming that a company controls its name is something we do to decide who gets a handle — it is not a status we display, and you should not read anything into its absence.

What we will not do

• Sell a reserved handle, or auction one.
• Release a handle because someone offered the holder money for it.
• Take a handle from someone using their own name, however well-known that name also happens to be.