Yeah, it's absurd nowadays. For several years, me and a friend ran a reasonably popular website and associated forum. I paid for the hosting, he paid for the d

Yeah, it's absurd nowadays. For several years, me and a friend ran a reasonably popular website and associated forum. I paid for the hosting, he paid for the domain. He gradually became less and less active, but eventually he forgot to renew the registration. I tried every way I could think of to contact him, without avail. I tried calling GoDaddy, explained the situation, and told them I'd gladly pay for renewal and to consider it just a "donation" on his account. No dice. I asked them would it would be available for purchase, and they told me some day x days in the future. I figured well, this really sucks, but maybe I can just snap it up the second it goes live. To my shock and anger it was bought up by some kind of domain parking organization in (x - n) days. They told me sure, you can have the domain. For $800. Needless to say, not being able to afford that, I ended up buying a new domain and trying to contact all the community members, but the site has been basically dead ever since. As for the domain, they had a landing page with ads on it for a couple years. Now the domain is some kind of weird blog-spam.