Domain mismatch when publishing with Github.

[ashubham]

Describe the bug
When trying to run

mcp-publisher publish

We get this error:

Publishing to https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io...
Error: publish failed: server returned status 400: 
{"title":"Bad Request","status":400,"detail":"Failed to publish server",
"errors":[
  {"message":"remote URL https://agent.thoughtspot.app/mcp does not match namespace 
      io.github.thoughtspot/mcp-server: remote URL host agent.thoughtspot.app does not match 
      publisher domain thoughtspot.github.io"
  }
]}

While the docs clearly state that when io.github.companyname scheme is used, any remote URL is allowed, as long as authenticated to github.

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/docs/guides/publishing/publish-server.md#url-validation-requirements

Expected behavior
This should successfully publish.

[tadasant]

Thank you for raising this!

For context, I think this is currently a mistake in the docs (i.e. implementation is as-intended, docs are incorrect):

For io.github.username/* namespaces: No URL restrictions (but you must authenticate via GitHub)

As designed, our goal was to prevent people from submitting Remote.url's they do not control. So we required that your namespace verification match up with the Remote URL.

However, thinking through this further, I see several issues with that goal:

• Someone might namespace their MCP servers like com.companyname.servers/my-mcp but the server might be hosted at mcp.companyname/mcp
• If you're using a third party hosting service, you can't align
• As you (@ashubham) are pointing out, there is demand for being able to point to a server from an io.github namespace. And because we don't allow name mutability (only by creating an entirely new server), this is pretty prohibitive for you.

So I think I'm convinced we should drop this requirement altogether. Just allow people to set Remote.url to any valid URL they want; no need for alignment with the reverse DNS namespace. In theory, that could lead to people spamming the registry with many entries under different names for the same Remote.url, but in practice I think sub-registries will be good at filtering this kind of thing out, and there will be little/no incentive to spamming in this way.

One use case I still feel weird about: if I find a URL in the wild, like https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/, how do I know the correct Registry metadata for it is the name: com.github/mcp server and not the name: com.spamdomain/github MCP server? But I think centralized registry is the wrong way to solve this: we should make a GET https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/ or .well-known-adjacent type flow possible where you can query the URL directly (or start the MCP initialization process) to properly identify the name of the server hosted there.

---

tl;dr I think we should just drop this name-based validation of Remote.url altogether (leaving it as a simple URL validation field). What do you think @modelcontextprotocol/registry-wg ?