Handles and addresses

What a handle is

Every Lynkur member has one handle, and it is their address: lynkur.com/ada. Their events sit under it too — lynkur.com/ada/product-meetup-oct-2026 — so the handle is part of every link they hand out.

Handles are 3 to 25 characters, lowercase letters and numbers with single hyphens between them, with at least one letter. No dots, no underscores, no accents. Two handles cannot differ only by punctuation or by the characters people mistake for one another: ada-lovelace, adalovelace and ada-l0ve1ace are treated as the same name, because at a glance they are.

Your QR code does not depend on it

Every profile also has a permanent address — lynkur.com/p/K7M2QX — and that is what your QR code encodes. It never changes and it always points at you. A card printed today still works after you change your handle, and it can never point at anyone else.

Changing your handle

You can change your handle once every 30 days. When you do, your old address forwards to your new one for six months, so links you have already sent keep landing. After six months it goes back into the pool and somebody else may take it.

If you close your account, your handle is treated the same way: it is held for six months and then released.

Names we hold back

Some names cannot be claimed from the signup form. The field tells you which of these applies, in these words:

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

We hold back 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.

Claiming a brand name

If the name you want is reserved for a brand and the brand is yours, sign in and press Claim it. You do not need to pick a different address first — your account exists without one until the claim is decided.

What happens next:

• You prove you control the company’s domain. We give you a short value to add as a DNS TXT record at the domain, and a button that checks for it. A company email address alone is not enough.
• A person at Lynkur reviews it. Proving the domain does not assign the name by itself. Somebody looks at whether that domain is the company’s and whether it entitles you to that name, then grants or refuses the claim.
• You hear either way. We keep a written record of every decision, including the ones we turn down.

We usually decide within two weeks. A review does not guarantee approval.

A real name that was refused

Our blocked list is measured against real surnames so that it does not refuse them, but no list is complete. If your own name is refused with This word isn’t allowed and a way to ask, write to handles@lynkur.com with the name. A person allows it, and the decision is recorded.

A handle someone else holds

If a Lynkur member is using your company’s name, or presenting themselves as you, report the page 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.
• We explain the decision and next steps. Filing a report does not guarantee that a handle will be reassigned.

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.

What we will not do

• Sell a held-back 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.