You are still emailing me lost passwords in plaintext. This just isn't acceptable.

I contacted you, worked my way through your support team until the manager I spoke to who was supposed to be connected to the dev team asked me what email client I used and said maybe it was outlook that was revealing my password. My email client (oh, I don't even use outlook) was allegedly cracking the passwords or something. I am not even sure what they were trying to say or imply. Whatever it was, it's ridiculous.

I only noticed this because I reactivated an old account because I thought listing with you guys would be a good idea to complement listing on sedo since you were also free now. I want to be your customer. I also want you to treat my information with respect and keeping my password secure is something I simply cannot compromise on. Please fix this issue so we can get back to selling domain names, because I simply won't do business with you until you do.

I published a post listing 24,000 available brandable domain names that anyone could register a couple days ago.

It was far more successful than I ever imagined receiving over 17,000 page views. Ranking 3rd on HackerNews frontpage and 2nd in a major subreddit with over 30,000 subscribers.

I wanted to go through the entire setup of the article, the marketing, the goals, the traffic, the results and conclusion.

read more

This is a continuation from this article.

My pickups were:
Hipeo.com
Docey.com
Blisu.com
Bliro.com
Releq.com
MuteU.com
Ocane.com
Smizi.com

There is a lot Japanese sounding names in there which I liked but didn't take. Enjoy!

Update 7:09 pm: Request for an affiliate link. So I picked my favorite consumer facing registrar NameCheap.

DISCLAIMER: these domains were checked against the zone file, NOT the registry. Some names ARE TAKEN but for whatever reason did not have name servers when the zone file was downloaded. Possible causes: somewhere in the delete cycle or simply no name servers registered.

read more

If 500 people subscribe to the DomainToad newsletter by April 1, 2011.

Oh look, a catch! Shocking!

Why would I do that? Because I spent a fair amount of time and some money to create the website and I would like to see that people at least try it. Releasing the code publicly will also take some more of my time to clean it up a bit and package it. If nobody cares enough or finds it useful enough to use, then I won't bother spending my time to release it to everyone for free.

I've released a lot of software I've written over the years for free or provided access to them publicly for free. Most probably never got used by anyone but me, if people are genuinely interested in having a copy of the code I wrote for Domain Toad they will subscribe for the newsletter and get their friends to subscribe as well. It's free and provides headlines from major domain blogs in your email daily. Other websites charge for that 'luxury.'

If the newsletter gets 500 subscribers before April 1, 2011 I will release the code with the open source MIT license. How will people be notified? I will post on my blog and email the newsletter subscribers a notice if it has 500 subscribers by April 1, 2011.

If someone is really that desperate to buy it, I will sell copies for $250 as is with 1 hour of support to get started with a non-exclusive license to use/modify it but not distribute unless it becomes open source. Contact me.

read more