Tuesday, May 29, 2007

I, the Domain Name Tasting victim.....

I have recently been a "victim" of the domain name tasting "scam". A domain name (.COM) which is somewhat related to me (which was owned by someone else) expired and as I knew from whois (which is another debate on its own) that the expiry date was coming up, I kept a watch on when it would become available so I could register it. To cut a long story short, it took me nearly 6 weeks to get the domain.

Each type the domain dropped off the 5 day grace period as it is not something that would generate ad revenue, it would be picked up by a different registrant, dropped again, picked up by another and so on. Of course they all had links on the domain's default page inviting me to purchase it for a fee (or I had the option of using a domain registrar's pre-buy service, at a premium over the normal domain registration price). I refused to take up either of these and persisted with my course of action of checking regularly.

After much research and analysis I came to the conclusion that, to get the domain name, I had to try and register at a time when the robots/scripts used by these dodgy registrants had not triggered. I found this time to be around 2 - 3 am West Coast USA time, and thus 6 weeks into my adventure I succeeded in registering the domain at 2:38am.

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