You Snooze, You Lose
Well it finally happened to me. My Humboldt Shooter's Page got hijacked. Well, I don't know that it was really hijacked, but the domain I bought kinda was.
A couple years ago I bought the domain humboldtshooters.net. I used that for my Humboldt Shooter's Page. Despite having warned others in the past to keep their domain registrations updated, I failed to follow my own advice.
Some guy e-mails me last night telling me that www.humboldtshooters.net no longer goes to my Shooter's page. It goes to some spam kind of page and apparently some guy/ company in Washington now owns the domain. I feel SO violated.
But I guess it's fair play if I let the registration lapse. What I can't figure out is why they did it. Usually people snag domains like that so they can sell it back to the original owner at a premium price. I don't see anything on their page asking if I wanted to buy that domain.
What could be their motive? Political perhaps? If they were doing something along that line, and that sort of thing does happen, you'd think they'd use the domain for some anti- gun message.
Any ideas? I suppose it's not really that big a deal since doing a search for Humboldt Shooter's Page still takes me to the actual location on my freeservers account. It does go to show, though: You snooze, you lose.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 7:44 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I love how the spam page has links to "make this your home page," and "bookmark this page." Oh yeah, that'll be useful!
I know that you believe in free enterprise, Fred, but Jesus, isn't there some level at which the practice of commerce becomes predatory? Is there no point at which we may cry "foul"? Dammit man, are you unwilling to fight these bastards?!
What the hell was Humboldt Shooters anyway?
Hey; I let the registration expire and they apparently bought it. I guess that's fair play, despite being irritating. What I don't get is why it would be worth it for them to do it.
I'm assuming they paid something for it. Why would you want to pay for a domain and then put a silly site like that behind it. I can't imagine anyone actually paying much attention to that site.
Oh, The Humboldt Shooter's Page is something I started some years ago. It just lists some of the gun clubs in the county and usually has a calendar of range events, this year's which I haven't received an update of.
Just something to do that I haven't paid all that much attention to lately.
It was also an easy way to plug the Libertarian Party of Humboldt. At the bottom of the page I credit the page to the Humboldt LP along with a link to the Humboldt LP page.
No biggie, but it does get a few hits now and again.
I have a link to the page on the original post for this thread, but here's the link where it's always been, even when I owned the humboldtshooters.net domain:
http://www.fredtyg.freeservers.com/Shootersmain.htm
They've taken your URL by paying for it while you were preoccupied (you were probably deleting their spam--another specialty of companies like this) so that they can get a few people onto their site. If you click on any links, they get paid for it. It doesn't take too many suckers clicking on "mold" (which leads to ads for Claritin and other products) in order to pay for the couple of bucks they paid for the domain.
Looks like some Fresno County web site didn't renew their registration and got acquired, just like me, but at least some porn guy bought their domain.
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