debate The domaining game is rigged (entirely).

[twiki]

Saw a comment today about (perhaps) smoke and mirrors. This made me twitch a little.

I'm pretty sure there is a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. Quite a lot. But it's not just that.

Bait and cast net for gullible fishies. (seen this too much)

Also search and get your regs snatched by(via) the registrar. ( seen this too much, and yeah, with many popular registrars)

Also pump your auction price up to infinity via vouched bot bidders. ( anyone missed this one...? )

Also "steal the dinner" = lowball offer to get your name for $100 when an hour later there's a 3K+ BIN going to come at ya. ( Had this so many times personally that I lost the count; so I'm not making any significant min offer anymore, or a min offer at all.)

Also I believe there's a new smoke and mirror league: So-called branding agencies selling overpriced domains and crappy sites to gullible (mostly fintech) founders. Ugh.

I've said it before: The game is rigged. Entirely.

We're the gullible believing that maybe, maybe, maybe it's not.

Make your voice heard below, we all appreciate it.

( Edit: Shall we also mention for a second, registrar premiums, hidden renewal costs and additional services, etc etc. But these are already too small to matter in an ocean of deceit. )

 

[Jason Baudendistel]

To clarify yes, the names are listed in several places for less than the amount I listed them for.

 

[twiki]

Why do you think this is the registrar's doing? Why couldn't the end user be testing you? It would make perfect sense from their perspective.

It's not the end user. Its an experienced middleman, I get all sorts of plays from them including the most common "I'm a poor student". Nah. I don't buy this crap.

And even if that is the end buyer, even more so, hit the BIN or get lost.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I don't do proxy bids anymore and I don't trust corporations.

You're not a cynic. You're a realist. It is what it is.

Edit:

As far as I'm concerned, this is true and not a myth. I've searched for a name which was never registered in the history of the internet, only for it to be taken 30 mins later when I came home. This happened more than once.

For this to be a coincidence is a statistical impossibility.

What coincidence...? There's no coincidence. And you haven't really seen it at play in full power.

They have stolen from me entire lists. 5-10 names at a time. Same registrars. In the next 5 minutes or so. Some of the most used and bigger registrars condone this.

The only link between the names is that they were in my short list of 10 domains or so of millions of domains scanned. (not even the same niche and type) I was just not quick at purchasing cause phone called or whatever.

Oh, and didn't happened once. Multiple times. Same registrars.

The only good part is that I do have a lot of volume so they haven't affected me significantly. But I noted and if I'm ever forced to use them again (such as, great deal one can't ignore) then I add all to cart and purchase right away.

 

[bolo]

far as I'm concerned, this is true and not a myth. I've searched for a name which was never registered in the history of the internet, only for it to be taken 30 mins later when I came home. This happened more than once.

I recently wrote about this happening to me. People didn't take me too seriously here.

 

[Liberty Wolf]

I do, and a few of us are, those who had direct experience in this.

Not only that but I had it so many times and with several domains snatched at once. The odds are, this happening by accident is an absolute impossibility cause it's a trend, it's not an one-time thing. I could even trigger it cause I even know at certain hours they tend to do that more.

I did repeat regging there for several reasons, 1) price, 2) wanted even to see if this happens again, and 3) accident, something happened and I had to postpone my buys for a bit. It did happen. Again and again.

Fortunately I do have enough volume so this did not affect my bottom line severely. But it did impact psychologically - a lot. It's an absolute disgusting thing to do.

Any idea how you think they are picking some names over others? Would it be random, or do you think they are looking for something specific? I'm kinda curious as to what criteria they would use to pick one over another. And who would be doing the reg's, one would think multiple accounts would be used, so they aren't all listed under one, that would be a dead giveaway.

 

[Culminant Domain]

I am wondering whether you can avoid such Domain name (D.name) theft by avoiding D.name registrars and using the Linux command line instead, thus:

#whois -H domainName.com

These days, I almost always use the whois command _FIRST_, avoiding the D.name registrars entirely until I am ready to register my D.names. Does anyone else use follow this practice?? If so, has it benefited you??

 

[Culminant Domain]

I do that through NameCheap. Unfortunately it seems they haven't thought enough of mine to snatch them. I just like the heartbreak of seeing how recently I was beaten to the punch. July 23rd, I believe it was, same hand reg was done within 12 hour span in Japan. Same date, the night before, or something like that. JesusFlood.com. The irony.

 

[bolo]

I completley stopped using brandable marketplaces 4 months ago and will.never look back.

Why?

 

[Max1000]

You can search at reputed registrars. For example I can vouch for Dynadot. Never had such issues with them, and I did a ton of searches. Bulk search is also improved right now.

With many other large registrars, yeah, you have this problem. You'll get your names frontrunned. With many of those mentioned and used by others here including myself (sometimes you cannot avoid using the biggest ones)

Agreed totally. Have never had any domains suddenly disappear after searching hundreds of names at DD. And their Bulk Search is the only one I've found where you can simply copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet.

 

[Max1000]

I had a tool that preformatted their former listing so I could copy paste even before (the whole page and it extracted the results),

That would have been useful lol!
I still often copy straight off the page into OOffice and do minor formatting, for speed on small searches.

 

[twiki]

That would have been useful lol!
I still often copy straight off the page into OOffice and do minor formatting, for speed on small searches.

Unfortunately don't have it anymore, was deleted (no more use). But you can download now at Dynadot.

 

[bolo]

I'm with @twiki