Register spellgrove.com and set it up for the site and email

needs-input priority 2 estimate M

server-architecture/018 · created 2026-08-13 · updated 2026-08-13

What this is

Kris’s call, 2026-08-13: register spellgrove.com — the current working title (see brand/naming.md, which already lists securing this domain as an outstanding step) — and set it up simply and clearly for our actual needs: wrapping the public site, and carrying email. DNS to be managed with an API key so an agent can do the work, rather than by hand in a slow panel.

This is the deliberate correction to a day spent discovering how bad the current arrangement is, and the reasoning is worth keeping:

cocreations.com.au’s DNS is at iFastNet/Byethost, which has no DNS API. A day’s work on Resend email verification died there (012).
That domain also can’t hold a mailbox: its MX points at the free-hosting web server, which 250 Accepteds mail for every address — real and fake alike — with nothing behind it to deliver into (017).
The registrar is not the DNS host. A Namecheap API key could not have edited those records even had it been valid, because Namecheap’s DNS API only serves zones on Namecheap’s own nameservers. Whatever is chosen here must be verified on that specific point, not assumed.
ai-task-runner.com was floated purely because its DNS has a working API and is explicitly rejected by Kris — it’s the task-runner platform’s domain and shouldn’t carry game traffic or mail.

What this needs to end up doing

The public site — currently lor.kris.ai-task-runner.com, built by the host cron deploy-watch (see the workspace README’s Deployment section). spellgrove.com should front it. Note the knock-on: LINK_CODE_BASE_URL in game/director/game.env points at the current host and must move with it (016 is why that’s a single, isolated line).
Email — at minimum a receiving address for SUPPORT_EMAIL (017), so password resets have somewhere to arrive. Sending (verify-email, 012) becomes possible again too, since DKIM/SPF records would finally be settable by API.
The game server — lor-server.cocreations.com.au could move under spellgrove.com as well. Not a given: it’s live, it works, and moving it means new TLS and a client-visible URL change. Worth deciding explicitly rather than by momentum.

Open, and genuinely Kris’s to decide

Where to register, and where DNS lives. These can be the same provider or not. The hard requirement is a DNS API that actually controls the zone. Cloudflare is the obvious candidate — registrar at cost, free DNS with a first-class API, and Email Routing that forwards support@spellgrove.com to any inbox for free, which solves the mailbox problem without hosting a mail server. Not a decision to take unilaterally: it puts a third party in front of the site, so it’s Kris’s call.
Which names move now vs later — site first is the low-risk order; the game server can follow once the rest is proven.
The API key. Whatever provider is chosen, the key belongs in the workspace .secrets/ alongside do_api_token, gitignored, per ../../CLAUDE.md.

Filed needs-input because the first step — registering a domain — costs money and is Kris’s to do; everything after it is agent work.

Definition of done

spellgrove.com registered, with DNS on a provider whose API an agent can drive, and the key stored in .secrets/.
The public site served from it.
A working receiving address, and SUPPORT_EMAIL set to it on the droplet.
Whatever moved is recorded — this is the domain layout the project keeps.

Update 2026-09-03: spellgrove.com is live — DNS, TLS and the site itself (building-the-game/001). What remains of this task is moving the game client’s base URL onto it.

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