Domain Scalpers

Posted At : July 26, 2008 12:25 AM | Posted By : Isaac Dealey
Related Categories: Crazy Talk

I hope every single one of them dies lonely, friendless and in extreme and prolonged pain.

A while back I'd purchased a relatively simple domain that nobody wanted... How do I know nobody wanted it? Because nobody had registered it. It cost me about $20. Great! And I set up a little site that never got very much traffic (as far as I know)... just a handful of computer programmers checking out some tools. Websites for engineers never see huge amounts of traffic, that's just the nature of the beast...

And then after a while I went through a period of depression and I let the domain lapse... and a scalper bought it... I discovered this last week actually... And I'm absolutely certain they paid the same $20 for it that I did originally... They replaced my small programming site with the typical domain scalper's one-page "this is supposed to look like a legit search engine site while actually being a scummy attempt to generate revenue on advertising while I wait for the original domain owner to pay me my exorbitant extortion rates" site.

But I was looking at the Network Solutions site to see what the options might be for making an offer to buy it back, since there wasn't any contact information on their pretend site. Apparently it costs $20 to make the offer ... and then the offer (separate) has to be at least $100... Okay... unpleasant, but still within the realm of reality...

And then I noticed this:

Hmm... Y'know, I really don't know what kind of offer they're going to expect...

Apparently they're not expecting that a human will assess the value of that domain.

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Tony Garcia's Gravatar I feel your pain. I've also been the victim of this kind of extortion. It's made me much more vigilant of my domains' expiration dates.
BTW, I did notice that ontapframework.com is still available...
# Posted By Tony Garcia | 8/5/08 2:11 PM
ike's Gravatar Thanks Tony. Yeah, I've considered moving to ontapframework.com but haven't made any final decisions yet... part of the reason why I haven't just grabbed up the next available domain is because there's still a lot of XHTML code in the projects (not the readmes that I had to redo), that have fusiontap.com in them as a namespace ... and in the XSL sheets too... so I'm trying to be a little picky about choosing where I go and trying to decide if maybe I want to use something other than a website url in the XML / XSL ... not that it would be a huge change, but it would require anyone using the framework to do a quick find-and-replace for xmlns:tap="http://www.fusionap.com". I'm just not ready to commit to that change ... yet... though I know I'll have to commit to something soon... I've also been contemplating the possibility of http://tap.on.net ... an Ausie friend of mine said something about knowing the guys who run the on.net TLD.
# Posted By ike | 8/5/08 8:10 PM
Brian's Gravatar fusiontap.net, fusiontap.org, fusiontap.me are all open ... it doesn't need to be a .com
# Posted By Brian | 8/19/08 10:20 AM
ike's Gravatar Thanks Brian ... my reason for not wanting to move to fusiontap.org or fusiontap.net is because people (myself included) are prone to habituation... so if I were to use fusiontap.org for example, most people are going to register that cognitively as "fusiontap" (minus the .org) -- and the science of memory tells us that they're more likely to remember it as "fusiontap.com" than as "fusiontap.org", simply because they see .com far more often and so they come to expect it and it's much more readily accessible in their memory. And hence there would be a lot more traffic to "fusiontap.com" (the scalper) as a result of my having moved to the other TLD. And I really don't want to give them any more traffic than they've already taken from me. Plus people will remember tapogee.com as "tapogee.com" and won't be confused by the other site.
# Posted By ike | 8/19/08 1:49 PM
Brian's Gravatar I think I'm confused now ... :)
# Posted By Brian | 8/19/08 1:52 PM
ike's Gravatar Sorry. :) Here's a fun blog article about Hillary Clinton's "sniper fire" comment that talks about source monitoring failure ... basically, if I used "fusiontap.org" I think I would be sending more traffic to the scalpers and I'd rather just have the traffic come to the project instead. :)
# Posted By ike | 8/19/08 2:44 PM
ike's Gravatar And here's that article actually that I forgot (speaking of memory) to include in the last comment :) http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2008/03/defen...
# Posted By ike | 8/19/08 2:45 PM
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