I have an interesting experience to share with you. I don't want to come across as making a mountain out of a molehill, it really does bother me enough that I thought I would do something about it. I've been around here for a long time (although I don't post hardly at all) and I felt like this would be a good place start. A lot of times I see something and I might think that's just the way things are or I recognize that others are already doing a better job than I am. This case is different. I've been wanting to take my interenet business in a new direction so I've stripped off a lot of old stuff and recently I wrote a program that could search lists of deleted domains for domain names that might already have established traffic (I had actually started to sell it and have since taken it down). It only took me a couple of hours and I immediately began registering interesting domain names that were listed in yahoo and other directories. Cool! Unfortunately, some of the better ones were taken, but that happens I thought and there was always 1 or 2 decent domains left. I was going to build some portal scripts to sell and I was going to use the deleted domains to drive traffic to the different catagories. I would provide interesting links depending what the original topic of the expired domain was. Some people might buy my portal scripts and others would find an interesting link where they would have found nothing. Then two things happened. I began to look at who was getting the other domains and I noticed that the better domains were consistently being taken by the same people. I also got a couple of emails from individuals whose domain I had registered saying that they had lost communication with the registrar and it was an accident that it was deleted. (After doing checks to make sure they were actually the original owners, I simply transferred it back to them for free and told them they can send me a check if they want, but that they don't have to. I've since read that most companies that do what I did charge the original owner an excessive fee to get the name back.) After the first email I began to stay away from domain names I thought might be accidents and also to check google cache's and other things to see if there was anything there before it was deleted. In a few cases I stayed away purposely even though it was a good name, particularly if it was a church or some other charitable type organization. Today I checked back on a few of those churches and other websites with religious or charitable content that I stayed away from. Most of those went to the same companies I noticed that was snatching up the best domains. They advertise p*rn and gambling and most of these sites pop up all sorts of advertisements. I could have registered those domains and I didn't because I don't have a lot of money and because I didn't want to cause problems for a charity or a church. However, it hurts me that somebody might be looking up a domain name for a church and find a p*rn site. Yeah, I know its not the end of the world, but I'd much rather just see the church get the name back. Most churches and charities have more to worry about than their domain names (and often change representative email addresses where the expiration notices are sent). Anyway, I've made a commitment to go ahead and register domain names for churches, charities, boys and girls clubs, etc. when I can and put up a friendly page telling them how to get their name back. I won't require payment, but I will accept donations to continue the service. Here is how you can help. My web site is in a mess right now because I've been taking a lot of old stuff off and sketching out some new stuff. However, I wanted to start getting the message out for help with this because I've already registered some today and I've spent all of the money that I could. I set up a page for donations at: http://www.vsoftdev.com/websites/donations.asp I feel silly doing this, but I also feel like I should try to do it. I welcome any feedback and I'll address it as soon as possible. Thanks, Jamie T Voss
Thank you for the positive feedback! I'm not sure how much of a difference I'll be able to make as I'm not as aggressive as some of the 'pros' who are picking up most these domain names. I won't post any details to avoid being picked up by a search engine, but here are my research results from today. I didn't get up early and do my search today (usually the drops occur betwen 6AM-11AM) because I didn't have the funds to secure the domains anyway. Normally I would have been at church today, but we had such a bad ice storm that even all the churches called off services. 1 Catholic school actually got their site registered, yeah! 1 School District site (ISD) went to a p*rn site 1 Family Support Site went to a debt and credit info spammer 1 Women's shelter went to a pay-per-click/p*rn site engine 1 Church went to the same pay-per-click/p*rn site engine 1 Church went to a site I've seen a lot before, but I don't remember what they point to (probably pay-per-click or p*rn since I've seen it a lot). I'll have to check back in a few days and see where the domain goes. 2 were not taken yet. I got 1 of the two that was at the greatest risk of being taken because of its popularity. The rest of the drops were not of any kind of church, school, or charity so I didn't worry about them too much (however, they were all taken but one). I have some data that goes back about a week. I really don't have time to go through every domain in detail and see where it went and post it. However, in summary, I went through about 30 domains that were registered over the last week and I would say well over 50% went to p*rn promoters. A lot of these are not in the US so there is probably little chance of easily getting the domains back. I think part of the problem is that .com and .net sites are (for the most part) not being dropped right now so these guys are grabbing .org sites which are for the most part churches, charities, and other organizations. I plan to have pages set up to help organizations with what to do if they can't get thier domains back. Reminders to spread the word to check contact information and try to get some of the domains myself when I can. Thanks for listening and for your support. Donations Jamie
I probably won't post again. Just wanted to let anyone interested know that I finished the page updates for now, providing as much information as I could. In the future I might break some of it up into tutorials and go into a little more detail. For now, I need to finish work on the rest of my site so I hope its clear enough. This is what it looks like coming from a deleted domain: http://www.pueblouway.org Jamie
