Ugly Situation (Inbox)
I have become increasingly distressed by a malignancy spreading through
the net. Several friends and otherwise good people have fallen victim
to something that while strictly legal is morally and ethically just
not acceptable. There seems to be pirates waiting in the wings to
pounce on unwary folk who happen to let their domain registration
lapse. If the registration lapses for even so much as a day, they find
the domain they have spent countless hours sweating over turned into a
porno site overnight. These people then are more than happy to turn
the domain back over to you… for an exorbitant price of course!
These extortionists are not afraid to ask thousands of dollars for the
return of your now smeared name.
The kicker is that some of the registrars are now making it far to easy
for this activity to go on. Imagine my surprise when checking on a
personal domain I already own and having the whois page return with a
link to a “waiting list” for this name! In other words, for a fee, you
can place yourself in line to capture a domain name if it ever were to
lapse and “become available”.
I can see the business sense in this, but I am also quite frustrated by
the utter lack of respect so heartlessly demonstrated in these
practices. I have no idea how to bring it about, but the best solution
I can think of is to have some sort of mandatory “cooling off period”
where the domain name could not be sold for, say, thirty days without
express written consent from the previous owner of the domain. Many
registrars are not sending any sort of reminders to their customers
whose domains are about to expire. Maybe something like this delay
would encourage them to provide some modicum of customer support. A
reminder to the owner could be completely automated and would require
very little in the way of personnel. I would think a registrar that
voluntarily offers this service might even find itself with customers
for just this reason, I know I would certainly recommend them to any
who needed them! [Robert Scott]
Use Optimize 3.0 to clear out your registry, and get rid of pesky errors that can threaten the stability of your machine. It's also easy to use to kill off unneeded processes that may be hogging up your memory - and will help speed up your boot times.
7 Comments
Anonymous
February 23rd, 2002
at 12:59pm
I was about to register a domain name and saw it had been purchased last month… precisely the time I created the Web site with the domain name I wanted. I didn't scoop it up then because I didn't know where I was going with it. It was purchased by someone with VeriSign, the owners of NetSol. Well, guess what, .org wasn't available, so I got it and now we'll see if they'll sell .com for regular price or not. If not, too bad, so sad.
Anonymous
February 23rd, 2002
at 3:13pm
In response to the main rant all I can say is… you snooze, you lose. You pay for a domain for a certain period of time. If you don't pay the rent then you get the boot and someone else moves in. If your domains are so precious pay for it for 10 years and stop whining. Registering dropping domains is a business. There are thousands and thousands of dropping sites all the time from people who have gone out of business and have residual traffic. Buying that traffic by purchasing the failed domain is just a business move. Why should people who buy the names of people who absentmindedly let a name drop feel obligated to sell it back for anything but what they feel a fair market cost is? And domains go on a blackout period before they're dropped so these people had more than enough time to figure out that they need to pay attention and pay their bills. And I don't know of a single registrar that doesn't email the owner multiple times to remind them to pay. If your registrar doesn't remind you that your bills are due then you might want to consider switching.
Anonymous
February 23rd, 2002
at 6:09pm
I agree with Jason. Pay attention to your bills and this type of thing wont happen. If you've got an important name or are a big company, just register the damn thing for 10 years or something and be sure to keep the domain record updated of any mailing or e-mail address changes. I've registered plenty of domains through various registars, and just about all of them are pretty good about sending invoices a month or two before the expire date through snail mail and e-mail.
Anonymous
February 23rd, 2002
at 10:43pm
That happened to me with Raver-Girls.com :/ Not that I'd be keeping it up anymore anyway, since I don't really go to raves…. but still. We had a nice little community of girls that posted on the message boards and stuff. Now? PORN SITE!
What's more…… the people I registered the domain with, domainzero.com, didn't even email me to tell me my registration was about to expire! Hmph! :(
Anonymous
February 24th, 2002
at 11:47am
As an ODP editor, I sympathise with Chris. Expired URLs which are then 'pornalised' are a total nuisance for us. A perfectly good site, with plenty of useful content, may get several listings throughout the directory. Then, one small slip by the domain holder, and suddenly it's a porn site. Since we have a tough line on porn (anything remotely pornographic or adult in nature is sent over to the Adult section at http://dmoz.org/Adult/ – even legitimate sites that just happened to have a pornographic banner at time of review), it either gets deleted or sent across to Adult. Therefore, if the owners do finally reclaim the URL, they've got to resubmit it.
But surely this is cybersquatting?
Anonymous
February 25th, 2002
at 9:21am
Well in a nutshell what Jason said is correct. Snooze ya lose. Anyone who is compitent is going to make sure they set a reminder to renew their URL if their business depends on it. You deserve to lose it if you are his lacks in your business practices.
The flip side of the coin is, this is NOT a new thing. This type of extortion has been attempted in the past and if taken to court, the extortionis loses every time if it is proven that the URL was grabbed for the sole purpose of holding the real owner over a barrel for an excessive amount of money. The trick is….you have to take the URL and ask an amount that makes the original owner question whether court costs are less than the asking price to get their site name back.
In any event….this is OLD NEWS….
ray
July 27th, 2007
at 4:49pm
moniker not only gives you a 30 -day cooling off period but they send email warnings. i don’t know what else can be done. if your registrar does not do this then its time to change and then maybe they will get the point.