I thought it was good at the time, i.e. "Mate, for your information...", e.g. "m8.fyi/something". However... it seems that many people don't recognise "m8.fyi/item" as a URL!
> In Warhammer 40K, the Orks faction have a big robot called a Stompa, but in French it gets translated as ‘Krabouillator’ for some reason. The Stompa looks nothing like a crab, so nobody remembers why it got translated to ‘Krabouillator.’
Stompa is another way to spell stomper. krabouillator would have been obvious to any French speaking person as meaning ecrabouilleur, or one that stomp. A far cry from crab (or crabe if you are a French speaker).
Weird the author didn't try to even investigate that.
Various levels of efforts are made but non-English joke/punny domains rarely are taken. I can readily make pun URLs like https://nanka.enpitsu[.]de/kaite ("draw/something.withpencil") or https://kabeni.kaite[.]moe ("drawing.onawall.isdrawing") or http://okuruma[.]de/irashita ("visiting/by.car") for example. That "some reason" are probably often harder than native language speakers think and I guess domain businesses hasn't tapped enough of regional markets either.
For what is worth 'Krabouillator' most likely should evoke Ekrabouillator which would be an orcish spelling of écrabouillateur (not a real word either) which is someone who "écrabouille"/crush/stomp. Écrabouiller is a real verb.
So: To stomp > stompa and Écrabouiller -> Krabouillator.
Why? They're the widest domains you can get within the character limits. Good for testing UI for bad wrapping with long data. Hacker News handles it pretty well.
Years ago, in my younger, I thought I was extremely funny days, I bought yomamashouse.com simply so I could own the email address of im@yomamashouse.com.
When SASS (the CSS compilation framework) was a thing I registered "sassrobot.com" thinking I might make a little microsite to help other devs with it.
I never got around to launching the site, but it did lead to the most horrifying auto-generated by a domain squatter email that I think anyone has ever received.
Back in university, some students (or was it only one?) put lots of effort into making a thing of the "Rautavistic University of Eschweilerhof". At that time, Eschweilerhof in Germany had only a population of 70 (now, its more like 71) and definitely had nothing that resembled a physical university. However, they wanted to come as close as possible to a real university and obviously having a web page was part of it: http://www.uni-eschweilerhof.de/ (in German).
I have just visited this URL for the first time in 20 years and it's gorgeous.
A friend and i did something similar! We set up a website for "${our_village} Metropolitan University", despite our village not being a metropolis and not having a university (a slightly deeper joke is that this form of name is usually used for ex-polytechnics in the UK, often in random places, and often not very good). When we wanted to make a webpage about some random topic, as one did back then, we'd make up a department for it. I remember we put all our computer programming stuff in the Poetry Department.
Excitedly bought pjg.com.au off the drop list. Because of the underline on the link, I assumed it was pig.com.au. Realised my mistake and made a list of companies with the initials PJG, pitched them, and sold the domain for 10x what I paid. Not worth the hassle all up! Looks like it's lapsed and been bought by a domainer since.
Huh, that’s the first time I’ve heard of a squatted .au domain in quite some years. For the most part people don’t try it because it’s against auDA rules. Even apart from the squatting rules, this particular registration is liable to cancelling because it doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria even before the even stricter rules that came in in April (though those don’t apply to this particular domain until they next renew it) because the domain name doesn’t match any business or trading name, or their line of business, or anything like that. In theory you could get this particular registration cancelled just by submitting a complaint to the registrar of record first, then to auDA if they don’t cancel it.
I've come across loads of squatted names over the years. I'm not familiar with the latest rules, but for a time you could just say that "pjg content site is a service provided by umbrellabrand pty ltd". What's the latest?
I did manage to get a domain cancelled the other week actually - renewed to an entity that had ceased renewing their ABN/ACN. Awkward process with the registrar though.
Squatting has always been against the rules and grounds for cancellation.
The latest changes are tightening the eligibility criteria. I won’t enumerate them, https://www.auda.org.au/policy/au-domain-administration-rule..., §2.4.4 (Eligibility and allocation criteria → com.au and net.au namespace) is pretty approachable. Under those rules (and again, pjg.com.au is currently tied to the legacy rules, not these ones), pjg.com.au fails to satisfy any condition in sub-paragraph 2.4.4(2).
I have chrismorgan.com.au, and my claim for eligibility is actually slightly tenuous; I haven’t registered any business name (something like $40/year if I recall correctly); 2.4.4(2)(a) I slightly surprisingly fail because it cares about legal names, and my first name is legally Christopher, not Chris, so it doesn’t match (they define the term “match”); and so my claim depends on 2.4.4(2)(b), that “chrismorgan” is an acronym of “Christopher James Morgan”—an unusual but linguistically valid interpretation of the word “acronym”, including their definition of it.
Of those two, ddp.com.au is squatted, but pbm.com.au isn’t, though there’s a fair chance of it failing the eligibility criteria or violating other auDA rules.
I’d be interested to see someone do a widespread squatting scan and submit a bunch of complaints and see what comes of it. But it’d take long enough that I’m not going to do it.
Years ago it was a very common tactic to buy up any three-letter domains you could get and find targets to pitch them to. I think the going rate was about $800. People would grab them off the drop list and have a pretty decent strike rate. In the case of PJG there were things like P* J* Graphics or P* J* Group.
My home town is too small to have a zoo. I bought a domain that makes it look like there is, which makes me proud owner of the veterinarian@ email address. I also had a lot of fun taking a free design template and combine it with Creative Commons zoo animal photos.
I did my first internship in IT in 1999 and worked for the predecessor of NTT Data in Germany. They generously offered me some domains for free "for lifetime".
Somewhen in the mid-2000s, I decided to add another domain to my account: "sonneausdemarsch.de" (sunshine out of the arse.de). Unluckily, they noticed I'm no longer on their paylist and they cancelled the subscription completely.
So long, my "lifetime" account :(
This is also how I lost marienkinder.de (marienkinder being a technophobic christian cult with the most hilarious pamphlet brochures you can imagine.
“It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.”
Back when I was in college in the mid 2000s, some people found a key in the grass outside one of the dorms. They set up a website with a photo of the key and sent the link to the general "HelpMe" mailing list.
As a tiny Pandemic project, I bought the domain and resurrected the site (from the Internet Archive's copy) for the nostalgia.
I bought "butterwank dot com" a few years ago (it sounds worse to British ears) because I noticed I kept getting phone calls from the registrar's sales team offering me web design services for domains I'd registered. I wanted to see if they would call up and ask me what line of business "butterwank" was in because it would be worth the $10 of entertainment to yank their chain. They never called!
I used to own “taps.af” based on a way you might describe the weather in some parts of Scotland - if it’s warm it’s “taps aff” (tops/shirts off) weather. It checked your location, fired off an API call to some service and showed either AYE or NAW (yes/no) depending on whether it was over 20°C in that location. It’s gone now (the .af domain was pricey for a joke service) but there’s screenshots at https://blog.mclemon.org/taps-aff
Back in the old days, I had iam.coop (my work nickname at the time) for a few weeks. It turns out that when domain registrars say they’re going or check your eligibility, they mean it. I failed. They took it back. For two glorious weeks my email address was hello@iam.coop
.coop (for cooperatives) is especially strict about this. You need to provide proof that you're a worker/consumer cooperative that is either actively doing business or has a documented business plan.
There's an Italian podcast, Power Pizza, which also does a similar thing, but the domains have a silly/surreal vibe rather than an offensive one. Their website is called unpodcastveramentebellissimoguardaveloconsiglioproprio.com ("A really beautiful podcast, look, I warmly recommend it").
Other examples:
cheschifoesserenudo.online: "Being naked sucks", for merchandise such as T-Shirts, etc. (now offline)
datecideisoldi.com: "Give us money", their Patreon
nondatecideisoldi.com: "Don't give us money", same as above
"krabouillator" likely comes from écrabouiller in French (colloquial/childish, to stomp and smash) that phonetically (and in young children) could be misheard or mispronounced as "krabouiller".
One night a few months ago, after two large beers I imagined up a domain name that was SO PERFECT that I HAD TO BUY IT and swore that this time, unlike all the others, I was TOTALLY GOING TO DO SOMETHING WITH IT.
The next morning, looking for an excuse to not get out of bed, I actually followed through:
Your website adds an entry to the history on every keystroke. You might want to fix that (use window.history.replaceState instead of window.history.pushState).
On mobile, it completely breaks the back button. I had to swipe about 50 times and watch it letter by letter to get back here.
Secondly, what's the data source? I just tested 'segue' which counted as 1, which makes me think it's guessing instead of like, a word map. Just curious now.
It does a client-side guess based on vowels, and then hits the server for an authoritative version. The server has a word:syllables map I derived from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
In the "segue" case, it looks like the dictionary lists two pronounciations, one as 'seg', so it uses the lesser of the two. Not sure that pronounciation is valid, though.
Thanks to you and frosted-flakes, I pushed a fix for the back button issue - good catch, I appreciate it.
My wife's ex was college buds with a guy who bought fuck.org back in 1999. I know he's been offered upwards of $1 million for it, probably more by now, but he's never given it up. My wife even got an email address out of it, though she doesn't use it. Dude's never even bothered to put up a web site. It's still just a single html file that says "fuck you" in the metadata.
Some trolls also do this for political reasons. https://antifa.com used to redirect to Biden’s website, as if he owned Antifa, but this is a troll. https://vamostovictory.com redirects to a website of Trump flailing his arms. Many others redirect to both sides of the aisle as political jokes.
I got a Cease & Desist from Chuck Norris back in the iPhoneOS 2 era for having a jokes app that listed Chuck Norris facts (among other categories of jokes). They also had Apple take my app down. I got it back up by listing Charles Gnorris facts instead.
LBJ currently resides in the Horseshoe Nebula, so luckily it will take many years before he finds out, so hopefully I don’t get a cease and desist anytime soon!
But joke's on me, because then there would be this long, drawn-out process of "How do you spell that? Are there hyphens between the words? Did you say 't' as in 'toy' or 'b' as in 'boy'? Now let me read that back to you."
In the midst of the inflated claims in the first dot com boom I bought itsjustafuckingwebsite.com and had a simple piece of text in the middle saying “That’s all it is.” It helped keep me sane in the middle of all the ridiculous hype.
I wanted a unique username that would let people find me on google and social media but whatever I entered, it was already taken so being frustrated - I typed in searchableguy and it was available.
I have a domain that I bought many years ago. I've had people call me on the phone to question me about it, and some people have even come to my house to see if I'm a real person because of it. It's a fun one.
https://gandi.net has always offered free WHOIS protection, at least for those domains that support it, if you look up any of my domains with them it's all pretty much hidden. I think some domains require the owners to have actual info, and not their registrars?
Now you just need to set up your email server so you can be jinseo.kim@jinseo.kim. That's pretty cool. Or for a less professional version, you could anagram it to mik.oesnij@jinseo.kim.
I think you mean palindrome it. An anagram suggests that the reformed letters spell out other names/words (though mik oesnij almost sounds Icelandic or something)
Tem years ago a friend and I arranged the FOSCON event, which was the free OSCON for people who couldn't afford that conference. O'Reilly was happy to collaborate with us by the way.
We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us.
As the MCs, we pretended to be the founders of a new company that was going to take on Twitter and Kevin Rose's new Pownce. We had slides between each presentation with awful marketing buzzwords and tried to appear as clueless as possible. We would ask people to quiet down and say things like "Listen, we paid a lot of money for this sponsorship..."
Omitting vowels was all the rage. We called our company:
Sqkwzr.com
(Can you believe that domain was free?)
The company took the concept of Twitter to a whole new level, where you could "tweet" out your farts and things like that automatically. We had a slide with each egress point labeled with hex addresses like 0xa55.
The tagline in the slides was: "every orifice has a story to tell."
Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu founder) was at OSCON that year and I approached him to see if he would attend and pretend he was an investor. I still have the email where he declined.
As long as you follow those rules plus pay the $185k application fee. In addition, you will probably need a big chunk of money on deposit or in some sort of trust to convince ICANN that it won't disappear if you go bankrupt.
I was curious about tab.vs.space, and find vs.space is unregistered and a premium domain; pricing is high and seems peculiarly inconsistent. Here are the USD prices various registrars list:
• get.space says it’s $5,000 (actually NZD7,102.40 and I can’t find a currency switch) to register, and the same to renew.
• Namecheap says it’s $3,250 to register, and makes no comment on renewal.
• GoDaddy says it’s $3,300 to register (marked down from $6,500) and $6,500 to renew.
• Google Domains says it’s $5,400 per year. (But until I explicitly asked for USD it was telling me NZD6250, which is about USD4400, a rather significant difference.)
A couple of other registrars that I tried didn’t cope with vs.space because they seem to think it’s invalid and a third character is required: hover.com just shows search results with no message to explain why it ignored the exact match vs.space, and 101domain.com tells you it’s too short to be valid.
Many TLDs don't count (letter dash letter) as a premium/reserved domain like they do for other dictionary words or 2-3 character domains. Looks like v-s.space is claimed but for example z-s was just $9.99 a year
I used that trick when .dev was launched and snagged a-z.dev for all my future domain name needs
I've bought a lot of silly ones over the years. When 'enterprises' TLD opened, I couldn't believe that criminal.enterprises wasn't taken yet, so I snagged it. Although I found myself reluctant to actually use it on a website (could be nice for a game though), I did end up redirecting it to a certain ex-president's organization, but only a few hundred people ever noticed.
I used to own cheeseonthemoon.com, it was one of my first websites back in high school and I just goofed off trying to be funny. It's still on archive.org where you can read about my theory (misinformation?) that there is cheese on the moon. There was a forum where me and a few friends would discuss random topics.
Long ago, I wanted to make a microservice that uses choon.to as the domain, pointing to popular shoutcast streams. The goal was to have a regular HTML webpages with the stream info served when using a browser, but send HTTP redirects to the actual Shoutcast stream source when media players being used to open the same URL. I thought having to paste into Winamp/Foobar2000 "http://choon.to/difm-trance" * was more user-friendly (or marketable?) than a bunch of numbers like "http://12.34.56.78:8888".
*: Although I was more of a di.fm Trance listener back then, another Trance channel, Afterhours.fm, still uses choon.in today as their shortcut domain.
When the '.xxx' TLD first came online, I bought 'brownchickenbrowncow.xxx' hoping to squat on it until some porn companies came around making offers. But alas, they never did, so I let it expire. I don't know what the heck I was thinking.
I have gleet.com just so I can make businesses e-mail me there.
And I registered recoveredlover.com to forward e-mail to my friends who'd already had Covid, back when they were the only people who could safely socialize.
I have grainislife.com which has nothing to do with wheat, barley, seeds of any kind, or agriculture of any sort. Nor does it have anything to do with the unit of mass.
special mention to tfwno.gf from the very politically incorrect cock.li (who also owns aaathats3as.com and a few others I probably shouldn't mention here)
Slightly related, I have a bunch of domain names I don't necessarily need -- acquired in the same vein as in the article (jokes, failed/abandoned projects, ...) -- and would be interested in selling them somehow if possible. Is there any general advice for how one goes about this? Is it just parking pages and hoping someone stumbles across them? Or is there a more-specific marketplace or something of the like?
They probably aren't worth anything. Since all the new TLDs got added, seems most people would rather just pick a different tld than pay some inflated price for a used one.
For selling domains uiu can list them on afternic or sedo. But if you don’t want to wait to sell, just list on nameliquidate, the Reverse auction for domains.
I bought derivadev.com about 6 years ago - I was going to create a site that was just full of (working) code snippets for all of the little problems I've had to solve over the years (think stackoverflow without the comments and wrong answers).
As with many other things, I never got around to making it...
edited to add:
Since most of my development work seems to be a derivative of some earlier project, it seemed apt
20 years ago I bought CThreePO.com hoping to sell it to a Star Wars fan. Nobody wanted it. I still own it.
I used it to host my essays and blog about science fiction. It is now hosted on my home machine and the things that used PHP no longer work. Many pages are orphaned. I count about 8,000 pages, although google no longer spiders most of them.
I used to own hitlerballs.com, inspired by this comic.[0] Couldn't really find a use for it. Looks like the current owner is trying to sell it for a profit, lol.
I used to work for a domain registrar, and was constantly buying new domains to test things out. I've since let almost all of them lapse. I think my favorite was "gravlaxandfailure.com" (an Archer reference).
I bought a few cool domains over the past couple of years for side projects: wrestle.buzz, scots.app, jazzkeys.fyi and jamieonkeys.dev. My favourite (joke) domain is Marco Arment’s bad.coffee :D
I wish I were this creative; I've mostly bought domains that are variations of my name/last name, and the only one I haven't let die is my usual username luord.com
I did think of using "flab.by" as an affiliate site for weight loss products. I thought maybe selling email addresses for fullofcr.app. EG "[politician is]@fullofcr.app"
I thought it was good at the time, i.e. "Mate, for your information...", e.g. "m8.fyi/something". However... it seems that many people don't recognise "m8.fyi/item" as a URL!