tomspark wrote:
Hey DocSenna — good news, there's nothing to add to an allowlist. SparkBox doesn't restrict domains by TLD at all, so .guru works fine; the AI got that one wrong, sorry for the runaround. What's actually tripping it up is the setup step itself. When you add a subdomain, SparkBox immediately tries to grab a free SSL certificate for it, and that only succeeds once the domain's DNS is already pointing at your server. If DNS isn't set up yet (or hasn't propagated), the cert step fails and it rejects the whole thing. Two things would help: (1) make sure you've created an A record (or a wildcard ) for your .guru domain pointing at this server's IP, give it ~5 minutes, then retry. (2) If it still fails, paste the exact error message you see — that'll tell me if it's DNS not resolving yet or something on the proxy side.
tomspark wrote:
Got it — and that message is misleading you, sorry. Your domain is totally fine; what actually failed is the SSL certificate step, and SparkBox just worded the error badly. (I've fixed that wording for the next update so it stops pointing people at a domain problem that isn't there.) The real cause: when SparkBox requests the free certificate, Let's Encrypt has to reach your domain directly — but Cloudflare's proxy (the orange cloud) sits in front and blocks that check. So even with the A record and wildcard in place, the certificate can't be issued while the record is proxied. The fix: in Cloudflare, open the DNS record, and click the orange cloud so it turns grey ('DNS only'). Give it a couple minutes, then retry the subdomain in SparkBox — the certificate check can get through now. If it still trips after that, paste the new error and I'll dig in further.