13 ms·

Strange domain names that developers bought

118 points by luord 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Pxtl 5y ago
There's a popular web comic called questionable content where a running gag of the author is to buy bizarre offensive domain names for his comic: questionablecontent.net boner.moe fart.computer dildo.pizza ass.golf mydickandballs.com dong.zone butt.church sexual.fish unionrobotics.net 69.bingo poop.rodeo boners.lol piss.farm swole.dog burgerking.sex powerful.dog cum.energy qc.bike rectal.dentist questionablecontent.horse
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > unionrobotics.net One of these things is not like the other....
  - teddyh 5y ago
    That’s a reference to the web comic itself: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3481 https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3481 The exact domain name is visible here: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3500 https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3500
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Shit, I wanted fart.computer! I don't remember what the project was, but perhaps it's better that way.
- lou1306 5y ago
  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
- myrmi 5y ago
  Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics, does a similar thing. Normally found at qwantz.com he also has chewbac.ca dromiceiomim.us
  - twic 5y ago
    Disappointed he doesn't have t-re.xxx.
- mech422 5y ago
  Wow..its been years since I read QC! Thanks for reminding me of it :-D Hmm - Schlock Mercenary is supposed to be launching a new series too...
  - teddyh 5y ago
    > Schlock Mercenary is supposed to be launching a new series too... I can find no mention of this anywhere.
    - mech422 5y ago
      Huh - I guess it ended last year...But I seem to recall when Howard announced the forthcoming end of schlock that he had other stories in mind.. edit: He mentions more stories in the q & a here: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/2020-there-will-be-an-ending/ https://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/2020-there-will-be-an-...
ketzo 5y ago
some time during a long night of talking about dumb shit with friends, I became the proud owner of http://thedarkweb.online http://thedarkweb.online. some day… some day I will figure out the right joke for that page.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Apart from acting as a honeypot for dumb people who want to buy drugs on thedarkweb.online?
- superice 5y ago
  In the meantime you should obviously have it serve a page that is nothing but a #000000 background
bugmen0t 5y ago
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.
notamy 5y ago
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?
- ca98am79 5y ago
  You could try Flippa or Dan.com, or set up your own parked page.
- bhartzer 5y ago
  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.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  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.
gmurphy 5y ago
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: https://haikupotamus.com/ https://haikupotamus.com/
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  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).
- axaxs 5y ago
  Neat idea, two thoughts: 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - gmurphy 5y ago
    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.
- Nurw 5y ago
  Oh wow this is great I have always wanted to Learn to write haikus
ca98am79 5y ago
One of my favorite domain purchases was them.us But I got an offer I didn’t want to refuse and sold it…
mzfdsgh 5y ago
I held on to rubygetsrailed.com for well over a decade without ever doing anything useful on it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sieabah 5y ago
https://loda.sh https://loda.sh
xrd 5y ago
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.
- partomniscient 5y ago
  >We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us. I just found it amusing that you could interpret this in more than one way.
  - xrd 5y ago
    I'm dying to know what other interpretation there is.
    - reificator 5y ago
      The main two that come to mind: > We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us. > We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I think I have 7-8 domain names on Namecheap for projects I want to do but never finished?
cromulent 5y ago
> johngalt.com [Ed. note: named after the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead] Editor, Atlas Shrugged, please.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I have a suspicion that annoying Ayn Rand fans was the point. Especially since John Galt isn't the protagonist.
agravier 5y ago
"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". Source: was 5
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
prawn 5y ago
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.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  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.
  - prawn 5y ago
    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.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      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-rules-licensing 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.
jqcoffey 5y ago
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. I let it expire.
- laurent92 5y ago
  I think it’s a good one. The joke is complete because everyone is there too: thomasfromaccounting@yomamashouse.com, etc.
- tmearnest 5y ago
  Back in the aughts, I had yomama.be. As in yo mama.be/trippin
jagger27 5y ago
I’ve been sitting on tabvs.space for a while now.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  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.
  - gbrayut 5y ago
    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
    - jagger27 5y ago
      That’s a great pickup.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    Naturally when I got the idea I checked this domain first. It’s probably for the best that they price them this way, at least for short domains. I think it’s a considerably shittier to charge a premium for <6-letter-dictionary-word>.dev however.
vincentpants 5y ago
I used to own hairwaytosteven.org. Wish I did more with it. Such is life. Edit: copy pasta cleanup. https://web.archive.org/web/20150801140916/http://hairwaytosteven.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150801140916/http://hairwaytos...
- molsongolden 5y ago
  The .com is a great barbershop in Baltimore.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andai 5y ago
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. https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1621 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1621
jey 5y ago
> www.assfart.gas Weird, because there is no “.gas” TLD.
dvno42 5y ago
I've been the proud owner of whalevagoo.com. One of these days when I have time I'll do something good with it.
touristtam 5y ago
> 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.
- numpad0 5y ago
  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 https://nanka.enpitsu[.]de/kaite ("draw/something.withpencil") or https://kabeni.kaite[.]moe https://kabeni.kaite[.]moe ("drawing.onawall.isdrawing") or http://okuruma[.]de/irashita 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.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  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.
neilwilson 5y ago
The icelandic domain 'mypen' caused much mirth in combination with https://www.isitdownrightnow.com https://www.isitdownrightnow.com For a few drunken minutes at least.
Garbage 5y ago
I brought geethub.com (a misspelling of Github.com) and have setup a redirect to Github from it. :) https://geethub.com/ https://geethub.com/
- laurent92 5y ago
  Some trolls also do this for political reasons. https://antifa.com https://antifa.com used to redirect to Biden’s website, as if he owned Antifa, but this is a troll. https://vamostovictory.com https://vamostovictory.com redirects to a website of Trump flailing his arms. Many others redirect to both sides of the aisle as political jokes.
johng 5y ago
I own a ton of joke domains... and tons of nerd domains. A few... fscking.com whoreanddecore.com inyourbumbum.com imgoingtofu*kyourmom.com limhoe.com limhos.net eatoutatyourmom.com and
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hedwall 5y ago
Back in my late teens/early twenties me and some friends talked about starting an industrial band (think Neubauten...) and calling it Slashignore. I now own slashignore.it for our break through, any year now...
darrenf 5y ago
I’ve owned localho.st for 20-odd years.
- twic 5y ago
  Pfff, i've owned localhost, without the dot, for longer than that.
bigbaguette 5y ago
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)
frereubu 5y ago
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.
searchableguy 5y ago
Not sure if I qualify but I own https://searchableguy.com https://searchableguy.com 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.
- yesbabyyes 5y ago
  Nice. I have a friend who uses ungoogable.com.
dnh44 5y ago
I'm not massively into the whole wsb thing but I found it funny so I got the emoji domain diamond-hand-rocket-moon.ws
metanonsense 5y ago
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/ http://www.uni-eschweilerhof.de/ (in German). I have just visited this URL for the first time in 20 years and it's gorgeous.
- lexapro 5y ago
  The 404 page is great
- twic 5y ago
  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.
noyesno 5y ago
I registered dunderstruct.com on a whim but I don't think I'll find much use for it, though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smcl 5y ago
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 https://blog.mclemon.org/taps-aff
jkellermann 5y ago
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. Ah, those were the times :D
- PinguTS 5y ago
  But both are still available as Denic reports. I still have: mussesfüralleseinedomaingeben.de
Havoc 5y ago
>That goes double for @NNekoru’s friend, who owned suspicious.link. I'm incredibly jealous
- amelius 5y ago
  I own all these names on my shadow DNS system :)
LadyCailin 5y ago
I have https://lbjfacts.com https://lbjfacts.com, which is a site full of.. definitely real facts about Lyndon B Johnson. I was just really bored one day, and it started as an inside joke that just kind of kept going.
- kenneth 5y ago
  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.
  - toast0 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure there should be a Chuck Norris joke in there. OTOH, you got mail from Chuck Norris.
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
    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!
- fl0wenol 5y ago
  That URL scans like something else with the protocol:// in front of that "l" Nice.
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
    The “B” in Lyndon B Johnson stands for blo… never mind.
csapdani 5y ago
I own https://56k-modem.online https://56k-modem.online I think it's pretty cool.
tonetheman 5y ago
I shall contribute mine: https://porkskank.com/ https://porkskank.com/ Nothing but a single photo of a dude with a bag of beans on his head.
ctippett 5y ago
I thought I was very clever registering `justthetippett.com`.
nikanj 5y ago
I grabbed 10x.guru back in the day, so that the next time someone said they need a 10x engineer, they can just ask their computer whois 10x.guru
rognjen 5y ago
I run a B2B marketplaces and when we were just starting out I got lordofordering.com
justanother 5y ago
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.
petecooper 5y ago
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
- jawns 5y ago
  .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.
- theandrewhead 5y ago
  Haha, I've done something very similar recently. I go by the name Cloud in some circles, so recently got thenameis.cloud when I needed a spare domain.
Vuska 5y ago
rossneedstowat.ch Shows my friend Ross needs to watch, but stubbornly hasn't.
DataCrayon 5y ago
I bought https://m8.fyi https://m8.fyi because I wanted a URL shortener to use for my work - it's hard to expect someone to type out "https://datacrayon.com/posts/plotapi/showcase/pokemon-types-with-plotapi-chord/ https://datacrayon.com/posts/plotapi/showcase/pokemon-types-..." from a GIF/MP4. 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!
- yitchelle 5y ago
  Love this. Are you an Aussie? Only an Aussie would start with a conversation with "Mate", or "Maaaate" for when emphasis is needed.
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    And Brits! Fairly common to be referred to as “chill, mate”…
  - DataCrayon 5y ago
    That is the first positive comment I've ever had about m8.fyi - thank you, really! I'm British - "mate" is used often but it doesn't sound as friendly as when Aussies use it!
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      It's actually not particularly friendly. The old joke is that Aussies call people they don't know mates, and people they do know cunts.
- athorax 5y ago
  This is fantastic. Thanks for putting a smile on my face today m8
  - DataCrayon 5y ago
    It is my pleasure! https://m8.fyi/athorax https://m8.fyi/athorax
teddyh 5y ago
“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.” — Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview
mystcb 5y ago
Ahh go on, here is my contribution: http://www.ireallylikechicken.com/ http://www.ireallylikechicken.com/
gadders 5y ago
I own fullofcr.app and flab.by. No idea what to do with them.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  A blogs around the proctocology, and the weight loss industries, respectively?
  - gadders 5y ago
    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"
    - mxuribe 5y ago
      The [politician]©fullofcr.app might have a limited market or at least limited lifecycle, but would be both hilarious, and I think very fulfilling for whatever each customer buys! As far as for flab.by, I actually think the affiliate links idea is a good one.
dboreham 5y ago
boreh.am , hence d@boreh.am incompetent.management fraudulent.marketing
rakic 5y ago
The Yes & No monogram in our studio’s identity is also the URL – ꑮ.com. We repurposed a Unicode A46EYI glyph (Yi Syllable XYP). https://xn--bj8a.com https://xn--bj8a.com (ꑮ.com) (For instance, all versions of Safari display the symbol in the address bar.)
- gcmeplz 5y ago
  That's cool that that works! It does trigger a serious looking warning in Chrome though: > Fake site ahead > Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL.
- jacobsievers 5y ago
  Oh dear, all I see is the New York Yankees logo.
jffry 5y ago
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. https://wefoundthiskey.com/ https://wefoundthiskey.com/
- kook_throwaway 5y ago
  Was the key ever returned?
jinseokim 5y ago
Recently I purchased 'jinseo.kim'. It's formatted like <first name>.<last name>. I love it.
- onychomys 5y ago
  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.
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    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)
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
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. https://twitter.com/mbuckbee/status/1365062949044424708 https://twitter.com/mbuckbee/status/1365062949044424708
coltonmorris 5y ago
Ah yes, I drunkenly made https://nicetik.tk https://nicetik.tk one evening. The .tk TLD is actually free, and hosting it on github is free as well!
pontifier 5y ago
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. Type "illuminati" backwards, and add a ".com" :)
- robrtsql 5y ago
  Does WHOIS protection protect you from that? I'd be freaked out if someone showed up at my house to see if I was Illuminati or not.
  - fzzzy 5y ago
    yes, if you pay for a whois protection service, it hides your personal info.
    - TheSpiciestDev 5y ago
      https://gandi.net 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?
jpomykala 5y ago
I bought “Format18.io” for my https://SimpleLocalize.io https://SimpleLocalize.io project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format18 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format18
benji-york 5y ago
I owned duckduckno.com for a few years. Lots of typo hits.
benmanns 5y ago
Some that I bought: https://ဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪ.name/ https://xn--ujdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... https://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.management/ https://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... http://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mx/ http://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... 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.
- wheybags 5y ago
  The link on there for widest subdomain is broken for me.
  - AgoRapide 5y ago
    Works quite fine for me (Chrome)
petepete 5y ago
Tried to buy onlyflans.com for a joke site about egg tarts, the squatter wanted $5k for it which was a bit steep.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  A plan 9 hacker bought only9fans.com and pointed it to shithub.us, which is owned by yet another plan 9 hacker :-)
kpgraham 5y ago
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.
wiredfool 5y ago
I had clueserver.com for a while in the 90s, but never did anything with it and it lapsed.
wise0wl 5y ago
I own kubernetees.com, because that's the way my former boss used to say it.
- handrous 5y ago
  AFAIK that's the official pronunciation, inherited from the Greek.
joshmanders 5y ago
My two favorite that I own are sw8.link and snack.dev
jdc0589 5y ago
I had emperor.io for years, used it for misc projects, email, etc... got contacted to sell it recently and ended up letting it go. originally bought it to host a error reporting platform back in 2014 or something, but never finished the project, as is tradition.
throwaway_2047 5y ago
Used to own software-engineering.blog. Big plans on it. Not anymore
jawns 5y ago
A while back I registered a couple of domains to use when store clerks asked me to supply an email address. They were of the form: notmyrealemailaddress.com thisistotallyfake.com inevercheckthisaccount.com 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."
squintychino 5y ago
A lifetime of suffering in the desert led me to create https://www.ihateaz.com https://www.ihateaz.com
yabones 5y ago
I bought onetwoseven.one for the sole purpose of sending one silly email as "root@onetwoseven.one" to somebody. I'll probably get some real mileage out of it at some point.
legrande 5y ago
If you want even stranger TLDs, look at OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/projects/ https://www.opennic.org/projects/ There's all sorts of weird gTLDs: https://www.opennic.chan/ https://www.opennic.chan/ https://be.libre/ https://be.libre/ You can create your own gTLD as long as you follow the rules: https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds
- jjeaff 5y ago
  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.
nicwolff 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lisper 5y ago
Many years ago I had occasion to register networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. The story of how that happened is here: https://big-fat-honking-weenies.blogspot.com/ https://big-fat-honking-weenies.blogspot.com/ [UPDATE] Hah! The domain is available again!
uberswe 5y ago
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.
petercooper 5y ago
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!
throwaway889900 5y ago
I managed to snag https://temporary.directory https://temporary.directory as my personal site. Good stuff.
laughingpine 5y ago
I picked up tendies dot ca just for the silly email address. A few weeks later I got a purchase request for 420 USD - I said no.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  missed opportunity to transform tendies to dollar dollar bills yo.
Wistar 5y ago
I owned stdarg.com back in the late 90s, early 00s. Never used it and let it lapse.
stronglikedan 5y ago
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.
cstansbury 5y ago
I picked up hairygum.com a few years back as a joke for a friend who like to play the hairy gum trick in his high school days.
melllvar 5y ago
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
donbrae 5y ago
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
luord 5y ago
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
caymanjim 5y ago
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).
nonameiguess 5y ago
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.
cratermoon 5y ago
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.
sjs382 5y ago
http410.com
dambon 5y ago
Having always been a fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic, I briefly owned https://weird.al https://weird.al
bilange 5y ago
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 http://choon.to/difm-trance" * was more user-friendly (or marketable?) than a bunch of numbers like "http://12.34.56.78:8888 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.

118 points by luord 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Pxtl 5y ago

There's a popular web comic called questionable content where a running gag of the author is to buy bizarre offensive domain names for his comic: questionablecontent.net boner.moe fart.computer dildo.pizza ass.golf mydickandballs.com dong.zone butt.church sexual.fish unionrobotics.net 69.bingo poop.rodeo boners.lol piss.farm swole.dog burgerking.sex powerful.dog cum.energy qc.bike rectal.dentist questionablecontent.horse

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> unionrobotics.net One of these things is not like the other....
- teddyh 5y ago
  That’s a reference to the web comic itself: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3481 https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3481 The exact domain name is visible here: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3500 https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3500
Y_Y 5y ago
Shit, I wanted fart.computer! I don't remember what the project was, but perhaps it's better that way.
lou1306 5y ago
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
myrmi 5y ago
Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics, does a similar thing. Normally found at qwantz.com he also has chewbac.ca dromiceiomim.us
- twic 5y ago
  Disappointed he doesn't have t-re.xxx.
mech422 5y ago
Wow..its been years since I read QC! Thanks for reminding me of it :-D Hmm - Schlock Mercenary is supposed to be launching a new series too...
- teddyh 5y ago
  > Schlock Mercenary is supposed to be launching a new series too... I can find no mention of this anywhere.
  - mech422 5y ago
    Huh - I guess it ended last year...But I seem to recall when Howard announced the forthcoming end of schlock that he had other stories in mind.. edit: He mentions more stories in the q & a here: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/2020-there-will-be-an-ending/ https://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/2020-there-will-be-an-...

ketzo 5y ago

some time during a long night of talking about dumb shit with friends, I became the proud owner of http://thedarkweb.online http://thedarkweb.online. some day… some day I will figure out the right joke for that page.

laurent92 5y ago
Apart from acting as a honeypot for dumb people who want to buy drugs on thedarkweb.online?
superice 5y ago
In the meantime you should obviously have it serve a page that is nothing but a #000000 background

bugmen0t 5y ago

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.

notamy 5y ago

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?

ca98am79 5y ago
You could try Flippa or Dan.com, or set up your own parked page.
bhartzer 5y ago
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.
SilverRed 5y ago
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.

gmurphy 5y ago

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: https://haikupotamus.com/ https://haikupotamus.com/

frosted-flakes 5y ago
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).
axaxs 5y ago
Neat idea, two thoughts: 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- gmurphy 5y ago
  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.
Nurw 5y ago
Oh wow this is great I have always wanted to Learn to write haikus

ca98am79 5y ago

One of my favorite domain purchases was them.us But I got an offer I didn’t want to refuse and sold it…

mzfdsgh 5y ago

I held on to rubygetsrailed.com for well over a decade without ever doing anything useful on it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sieabah 5y ago

https://loda.sh https://loda.sh

xrd 5y ago

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.

partomniscient 5y ago
>We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us. I just found it amusing that you could interpret this in more than one way.
- xrd 5y ago
  I'm dying to know what other interpretation there is.
  - reificator 5y ago
    The main two that come to mind: > We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us. > We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I think I have 7-8 domain names on Namecheap for projects I want to do but never finished?

cromulent 5y ago

> johngalt.com [Ed. note: named after the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead] Editor, Atlas Shrugged, please.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
I have a suspicion that annoying Ayn Rand fans was the point. Especially since John Galt isn't the protagonist.

agravier 5y ago

"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". Source: was 5

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

prawn 5y ago

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.

chrismorgan 5y ago
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.
- prawn 5y ago
  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.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    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-rules-licensing 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.

jqcoffey 5y ago

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. I let it expire.

laurent92 5y ago
I think it’s a good one. The joke is complete because everyone is there too: thomasfromaccounting@yomamashouse.com, etc.
tmearnest 5y ago
Back in the aughts, I had yomama.be. As in yo mama.be/trippin

jagger27 5y ago

I’ve been sitting on tabvs.space for a while now.

chrismorgan 5y ago
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.
- gbrayut 5y ago
  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
  - jagger27 5y ago
    That’s a great pickup.
- jagger27 5y ago
  Naturally when I got the idea I checked this domain first. It’s probably for the best that they price them this way, at least for short domains. I think it’s a considerably shittier to charge a premium for <6-letter-dictionary-word>.dev however.

vincentpants 5y ago

I used to own hairwaytosteven.org. Wish I did more with it. Such is life. Edit: copy pasta cleanup. https://web.archive.org/web/20150801140916/http://hairwaytosteven.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150801140916/http://hairwaytos...

molsongolden 5y ago
The .com is a great barbershop in Baltimore.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andai 5y ago

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. https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1621 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1621

jey 5y ago

> www.assfart.gas Weird, because there is no “.gas” TLD.

dvno42 5y ago

I've been the proud owner of whalevagoo.com. One of these days when I have time I'll do something good with it.

touristtam 5y ago

> 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.

numpad0 5y ago
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 https://nanka.enpitsu[.]de/kaite ("draw/something.withpencil") or https://kabeni.kaite[.]moe https://kabeni.kaite[.]moe ("drawing.onawall.isdrawing") or http://okuruma[.]de/irashita 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.
johnchristopher 5y ago
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.

neilwilson 5y ago

The icelandic domain 'mypen' caused much mirth in combination with https://www.isitdownrightnow.com https://www.isitdownrightnow.com For a few drunken minutes at least.

Garbage 5y ago

I brought geethub.com (a misspelling of Github.com) and have setup a redirect to Github from it. :) https://geethub.com/ https://geethub.com/

laurent92 5y ago
Some trolls also do this for political reasons. https://antifa.com https://antifa.com used to redirect to Biden’s website, as if he owned Antifa, but this is a troll. https://vamostovictory.com https://vamostovictory.com redirects to a website of Trump flailing his arms. Many others redirect to both sides of the aisle as political jokes.

johng 5y ago

I own a ton of joke domains... and tons of nerd domains. A few... fscking.com whoreanddecore.com inyourbumbum.com imgoingtofu*kyourmom.com limhoe.com limhos.net eatoutatyourmom.com and

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hedwall 5y ago

Back in my late teens/early twenties me and some friends talked about starting an industrial band (think Neubauten...) and calling it Slashignore. I now own slashignore.it for our break through, any year now...

darrenf 5y ago

I’ve owned localho.st for 20-odd years.

twic 5y ago
Pfff, i've owned localhost, without the dot, for longer than that.

bigbaguette 5y ago

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)

frereubu 5y ago

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.

searchableguy 5y ago

Not sure if I qualify but I own https://searchableguy.com https://searchableguy.com 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.

yesbabyyes 5y ago
Nice. I have a friend who uses ungoogable.com.

dnh44 5y ago

I'm not massively into the whole wsb thing but I found it funny so I got the emoji domain diamond-hand-rocket-moon.ws

metanonsense 5y ago

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/ http://www.uni-eschweilerhof.de/ (in German). I have just visited this URL for the first time in 20 years and it's gorgeous.

lexapro 5y ago
The 404 page is great
twic 5y ago
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.

noyesno 5y ago

I registered dunderstruct.com on a whim but I don't think I'll find much use for it, though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smcl 5y ago

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 https://blog.mclemon.org/taps-aff

jkellermann 5y ago

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. Ah, those were the times :D

PinguTS 5y ago
But both are still available as Denic reports. I still have: mussesfüralleseinedomaingeben.de

Havoc 5y ago

>That goes double for @NNekoru’s friend, who owned suspicious.link. I'm incredibly jealous

amelius 5y ago
I own all these names on my shadow DNS system :)

LadyCailin 5y ago

I have https://lbjfacts.com https://lbjfacts.com, which is a site full of.. definitely real facts about Lyndon B Johnson. I was just really bored one day, and it started as an inside joke that just kind of kept going.

kenneth 5y ago
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.
- toast0 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure there should be a Chuck Norris joke in there. OTOH, you got mail from Chuck Norris.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  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!
fl0wenol 5y ago
That URL scans like something else with the protocol:// in front of that "l" Nice.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  The “B” in Lyndon B Johnson stands for blo… never mind.

csapdani 5y ago

I own https://56k-modem.online https://56k-modem.online I think it's pretty cool.

tonetheman 5y ago

I shall contribute mine: https://porkskank.com/ https://porkskank.com/ Nothing but a single photo of a dude with a bag of beans on his head.

ctippett 5y ago

I thought I was very clever registering `justthetippett.com`.

nikanj 5y ago

I grabbed 10x.guru back in the day, so that the next time someone said they need a 10x engineer, they can just ask their computer whois 10x.guru

rognjen 5y ago

I run a B2B marketplaces and when we were just starting out I got lordofordering.com

justanother 5y ago

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.

petecooper 5y ago

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

jawns 5y ago
.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.
theandrewhead 5y ago
Haha, I've done something very similar recently. I go by the name Cloud in some circles, so recently got thenameis.cloud when I needed a spare domain.

Vuska 5y ago

rossneedstowat.ch Shows my friend Ross needs to watch, but stubbornly hasn't.

DataCrayon 5y ago

I bought https://m8.fyi https://m8.fyi because I wanted a URL shortener to use for my work - it's hard to expect someone to type out "https://datacrayon.com/posts/plotapi/showcase/pokemon-types-with-plotapi-chord/ https://datacrayon.com/posts/plotapi/showcase/pokemon-types-..." from a GIF/MP4. 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!

yitchelle 5y ago
Love this. Are you an Aussie? Only an Aussie would start with a conversation with "Mate", or "Maaaate" for when emphasis is needed.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  And Brits! Fairly common to be referred to as “chill, mate”…
- DataCrayon 5y ago
  That is the first positive comment I've ever had about m8.fyi - thank you, really! I'm British - "mate" is used often but it doesn't sound as friendly as when Aussies use it!
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    It's actually not particularly friendly. The old joke is that Aussies call people they don't know mates, and people they do know cunts.
athorax 5y ago
This is fantastic. Thanks for putting a smile on my face today m8
- DataCrayon 5y ago
  It is my pleasure! https://m8.fyi/athorax https://m8.fyi/athorax

teddyh 5y ago

“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.” — Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview

mystcb 5y ago

Ahh go on, here is my contribution: http://www.ireallylikechicken.com/ http://www.ireallylikechicken.com/

gadders 5y ago

I own fullofcr.app and flab.by. No idea what to do with them.

mxuribe 5y ago
A blogs around the proctocology, and the weight loss industries, respectively?
- gadders 5y ago
  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"
  - mxuribe 5y ago
    The [politician]©fullofcr.app might have a limited market or at least limited lifecycle, but would be both hilarious, and I think very fulfilling for whatever each customer buys! As far as for flab.by, I actually think the affiliate links idea is a good one.

dboreham 5y ago

boreh.am , hence d@boreh.am incompetent.management fraudulent.marketing

rakic 5y ago

The Yes & No monogram in our studio’s identity is also the URL – ꑮ.com. We repurposed a Unicode A46EYI glyph (Yi Syllable XYP). https://xn--bj8a.com https://xn--bj8a.com (ꑮ.com) (For instance, all versions of Safari display the symbol in the address bar.)

gcmeplz 5y ago
That's cool that that works! It does trigger a serious looking warning in Chrome though: > Fake site ahead > Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL.
jacobsievers 5y ago
Oh dear, all I see is the New York Yankees logo.

jffry 5y ago

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. https://wefoundthiskey.com/ https://wefoundthiskey.com/

kook_throwaway 5y ago
Was the key ever returned?

jinseokim 5y ago

Recently I purchased 'jinseo.kim'. It's formatted like <first name>.<last name>. I love it.

onychomys 5y ago
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.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  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)

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

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. https://twitter.com/mbuckbee/status/1365062949044424708 https://twitter.com/mbuckbee/status/1365062949044424708

coltonmorris 5y ago

Ah yes, I drunkenly made https://nicetik.tk https://nicetik.tk one evening. The .tk TLD is actually free, and hosting it on github is free as well!

pontifier 5y ago

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. Type "illuminati" backwards, and add a ".com" :)

robrtsql 5y ago
Does WHOIS protection protect you from that? I'd be freaked out if someone showed up at my house to see if I was Illuminati or not.
- fzzzy 5y ago
  yes, if you pay for a whois protection service, it hides your personal info.
  - TheSpiciestDev 5y ago
    https://gandi.net 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?

jpomykala 5y ago

I bought “Format18.io” for my https://SimpleLocalize.io https://SimpleLocalize.io project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format18 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format18

benji-york 5y ago

I owned duckduckno.com for a few years. Lots of typo hits.

benmanns 5y ago

Some that I bought: https://ဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪဪ.name/ https://xn--ujdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... https://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.management/ https://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... http://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.mx/ http://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... 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.

wheybags 5y ago
The link on there for widest subdomain is broken for me.
- AgoRapide 5y ago
  Works quite fine for me (Chrome)

petepete 5y ago

Tried to buy onlyflans.com for a joke site about egg tarts, the squatter wanted $5k for it which was a bit steep.

MisterTea 5y ago
A plan 9 hacker bought only9fans.com and pointed it to shithub.us, which is owned by yet another plan 9 hacker :-)

kpgraham 5y ago

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.

wiredfool 5y ago

I had clueserver.com for a while in the 90s, but never did anything with it and it lapsed.

wise0wl 5y ago

I own kubernetees.com, because that's the way my former boss used to say it.

handrous 5y ago
AFAIK that's the official pronunciation, inherited from the Greek.

joshmanders 5y ago

My two favorite that I own are sw8.link and snack.dev

jdc0589 5y ago

I had emperor.io for years, used it for misc projects, email, etc... got contacted to sell it recently and ended up letting it go. originally bought it to host a error reporting platform back in 2014 or something, but never finished the project, as is tradition.

throwaway_2047 5y ago

Used to own software-engineering.blog. Big plans on it. Not anymore

jawns 5y ago

A while back I registered a couple of domains to use when store clerks asked me to supply an email address. They were of the form: notmyrealemailaddress.com thisistotallyfake.com inevercheckthisaccount.com 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."

squintychino 5y ago

A lifetime of suffering in the desert led me to create https://www.ihateaz.com https://www.ihateaz.com

yabones 5y ago

I bought onetwoseven.one for the sole purpose of sending one silly email as "root@onetwoseven.one" to somebody. I'll probably get some real mileage out of it at some point.

legrande 5y ago

If you want even stranger TLDs, look at OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/projects/ https://www.opennic.org/projects/ There's all sorts of weird gTLDs: https://www.opennic.chan/ https://www.opennic.chan/ https://be.libre/ https://be.libre/ You can create your own gTLD as long as you follow the rules: https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds

jjeaff 5y ago
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.

nicwolff 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lisper 5y ago

Many years ago I had occasion to register networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. The story of how that happened is here: https://big-fat-honking-weenies.blogspot.com/ https://big-fat-honking-weenies.blogspot.com/ [UPDATE] Hah! The domain is available again!

uberswe 5y ago

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.

petercooper 5y ago

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!

throwaway889900 5y ago

I managed to snag https://temporary.directory https://temporary.directory as my personal site. Good stuff.

laughingpine 5y ago

I picked up tendies dot ca just for the silly email address. A few weeks later I got a purchase request for 420 USD - I said no.

rootsudo 5y ago
missed opportunity to transform tendies to dollar dollar bills yo.

Wistar 5y ago

I owned stdarg.com back in the late 90s, early 00s. Never used it and let it lapse.

stronglikedan 5y ago

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.

cstansbury 5y ago

I picked up hairygum.com a few years back as a joke for a friend who like to play the hairy gum trick in his high school days.

melllvar 5y ago

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

donbrae 5y ago

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

luord 5y ago

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

caymanjim 5y ago

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).

nonameiguess 5y ago

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.

cratermoon 5y ago

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.

sjs382 5y ago

http410.com

dambon 5y ago

Having always been a fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic, I briefly owned https://weird.al https://weird.al

bilange 5y ago

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 http://choon.to/difm-trance" * was more user-friendly (or marketable?) than a bunch of numbers like "http://12.34.56.78:8888 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.