Tale of a Domain Name
The rise and fall of a hit magnet.
It was one of those domain names that maybe matches a key word or idea, but probably doesn't predict the style or flavor of your particular Web site. Still, you watch it. You monitor it. You know it must be bringing in thousands of hits a day.
In my case, I went a bit further. After all, the domain was being underutilized. Or perhaps a better word would be psychoutilized. It was the showcase of a schizophrenic. No design. No layout. Just huge streams of text babbling this man's paranoid fantasies. So I did what any red-blooded geek would do... a Whois. That's when I first found Hank (names have been changed to protect um... myself). He was the domain owner, and his name did not match the psycho's name, so I sent him an e-mail. How much did he want for the domain name?
Well, it was late 1999 and I was in way over my head. Hank said he had an offer of $75,000 (from a survivalist group), and I was thinking more like lunch money, or maybe drawing him a pretty picture. So we both let it drop. Meanwhile, he never did sell.
Then the year 2000 came along and stomped its big hairy foot on the Internet pie. Hank blew his chance for the big bucks, and never found anything better to do with his domain than let his friend use it as a forum for his psychosis.
Then the year 2001 came along, and the beloved domain name of my obsession was now pointing to nothing at all! Time for another e-mail. Hank told me the kook had disappeared, so he quit bothering to keep the site up. This time, I got Hank to look at my site. He liked it! Oh joy! By now, my goals were a little more modest, just a link would have sufficed, but he insisted on pointing the domain name directly to my site. Very cool.
All I had to do in return was make a popup window with his own personal site in it, which I would host for him. Okay. I didn't mind. After all, I would only make the popup for people using his domain name. And his content was not insane, like his friends. He just had a lot of preachy stuff to say about how great Atheism was. Fine with me. I don't owe Christianity any favors.
So, deal done. December of last year, my stats go through the roof. Thousands of hits (and dozens of e-mails) a day. Admittedly, most of the e-mails were pissy and/or irrelevant, but there was the occassional one with potential. All in all, I managed to collect 170 e-mails with at least somewhat positive comments. (I also learned that the schizo had a fanbase.)
But my "relationship" with Hank didn't end there. He sent me lots of "friendly" e-mails, that fell into two categories. Here's an example of category number 1:
Have you noticed the sharp increase on your stats page? :) I always knew that ********.com was a hit magnet. :) How is it affecting your bandwidth? Are you getting stuck with extra charges? Our hosting ended up costing more than $400/month right before Y2K. It calmed down a bit after
that. .......
Oh, and you might be pleased to note that I spent some time getting you into the google search engine, if you search the word "********" you come up number one.
I call this the "Look what a great favor I'm doing you" category. Made me a little nervous.
Category number 2 was not addressed directly to me. He would Bcc me on his e-mail diatribes. First, they were diatribes against religion. Then he started sending me diatribes against gun control. Living in a city full of angry people, I was quick to defend gun control, which led to an extended argument, at which point I learned some things about Hank:
1. He doesn't get mad. He just smiles patronizingly.
2. He's very proud of the fact that he doesn't get mad, because he thinks this means he is logical.
3. Because he thinks he is logical, he is quite sure that he is right. All the time.
So, at this point I was not very fond of Hank. What he calls "logic" I call a lack of personality. But he had no problem with my disagreements, and the domain name continued to bring surfers to my site.
The greatest advantage for me was that some people were reading all the way through my web-novel-in-progress. Somewhere between 10 and 20 a month, which really blew me away since this means they read through over 100 web pages.
So that's about 4 months of unmitigated happiness, of smugly knowing I had more hits than anyone else I knew. Until April 20th. That's when I got a category 2 e-mail from Hank. There was one section in particular that really grabbed my attention. He was arguing against a woman's right to not have an abortion! That's gross enough, but it was only the beginning:
Often the male wishes for an abortion, but the female does not. Thus the male is subject to child support payments for 18 years! To make this process more fair, if there is dispute, a "flip of the coin" kind of arrangement should be performed where one will win, while one will lose. I could live with that kind of situation, I can't stand the fact that women wield ultimate power over males, and further minorities now wield ultimate power over white males. White males seem to be the most FUCKED of all human primates at this moment in time, even tho they are the most productive, and have given the world EVERYTHING we have today! Without the white male, people would be in grass huts, carving out scary looking masks for entertainment!
Didja notice how he transitioned from misogyny right into racism? Well, I called him on it. So much for the domain name, I thought. But no. Hank was proud to be a racist. And nothing I said upset him. Nor could I dissuade him in the face of the copious facts and evidence he had collected from White Power brochures and Web sites.
Here was my moral quandary. No one could say I was cowtowing to keep this domain name. My sentiments had been made clear. So I let it ride. It's not like I was doing anything anyway. He was pointing the domain to me. And nothing he had on my Web site was racist, just atheist.
And so, shamefully enough, a full month went by. Then I got a category One e-mail:
Have you checked out the /stats lately? :o) Given a quarter million hits a month, you want to try to generate revenue via this domain (********.com)? We could offer right now, since I maintain the mail service for this domain, mailto:yourname@*******.com, yourname@*******.com redirects, or if your host allows it, pop3 or web based email from your server. I've received a lot of requests for email accounts. Since our hosting costs pushed up to $400 a month prior to Y2K, I'm sure your hosting costs are high right now too, and you also could use some income from it. :o)
So now he wanted to go into business together. The writing was on the wall. My response had none of the rancor of earlier e-mails I'd sent, because I was now resigned to our fate:
It's been a blast, but let's just forget the whole thing. I'm removing your content from my Web site and you can point your domain name wherever you like.
And so I did. I removed every distasteful byte of his content. At first, he questioned why I would do such a thing. He seemed utterly clueless, but I soon clued him in:
The reason for ending this was so that I have no further association with a racist.
Never one to give me the last word, he sent this response, combining categories 1 and 2 and convincing me yet further that I had made the right decision:
Don, keep in mind that if you do not support your race, and if nobody in your race supports your race, your race will be replaced by races that _DO_ support their races. Black power = black dominance. Blacks are currently out-pacing whites in reproduction, and you know this is true, but apparently you don't seem to care. However, after the blacks become dominant, starvation and disease will return their population back to normally small numbers. We saw this after the blacks killed and chased out all the whites in Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and in South Africa. Most important is YOU KNOW this to be true, you are just in denial. :o/
Thank you for sending me the final count. :o) BTW, ending our
relationship has had the greatest impact on you, it did not affect me at all really. Visit http://www.*********.com/ right now and see why. :o) The first month of pointing *********.com at your site you went from 30 thousand hits per month to over 210 thousand hits per month, with the next full month being over 250 thousand hits. Watch now as your hit count reverts back to previous levels. Also note, that even tho you and I disagree, I continued to support your site, and continued to offer you service even tho it was costing me money to do so. DNS service is costing me about $10 a month for that domain due to the heavy traffic. I guess you deleting my pages and discontinuing the relationship proves that I'm the better man, eh? :o) Have a nice life Don, I'm deleting you from my address book, and from my [mailing list], remember well what you have lost.
Yes, Hank, I will remember well what I lost. And I'll do my best to keep it lost. Hell, it's not like the man had "sex.com" or nothing.
In my case, I went a bit further. After all, the domain was being underutilized. Or perhaps a better word would be psychoutilized. It was the showcase of a schizophrenic. No design. No layout. Just huge streams of text babbling this man's paranoid fantasies. So I did what any red-blooded geek would do... a Whois. That's when I first found Hank (names have been changed to protect um... myself). He was the domain owner, and his name did not match the psycho's name, so I sent him an e-mail. How much did he want for the domain name?
Well, it was late 1999 and I was in way over my head. Hank said he had an offer of $75,000 (from a survivalist group), and I was thinking more like lunch money, or maybe drawing him a pretty picture. So we both let it drop. Meanwhile, he never did sell.
Then the year 2000 came along and stomped its big hairy foot on the Internet pie. Hank blew his chance for the big bucks, and never found anything better to do with his domain than let his friend use it as a forum for his psychosis.
Then the year 2001 came along, and the beloved domain name of my obsession was now pointing to nothing at all! Time for another e-mail. Hank told me the kook had disappeared, so he quit bothering to keep the site up. This time, I got Hank to look at my site. He liked it! Oh joy! By now, my goals were a little more modest, just a link would have sufficed, but he insisted on pointing the domain name directly to my site. Very cool.
All I had to do in return was make a popup window with his own personal site in it, which I would host for him. Okay. I didn't mind. After all, I would only make the popup for people using his domain name. And his content was not insane, like his friends. He just had a lot of preachy stuff to say about how great Atheism was. Fine with me. I don't owe Christianity any favors.
So, deal done. December of last year, my stats go through the roof. Thousands of hits (and dozens of e-mails) a day. Admittedly, most of the e-mails were pissy and/or irrelevant, but there was the occassional one with potential. All in all, I managed to collect 170 e-mails with at least somewhat positive comments. (I also learned that the schizo had a fanbase.)
But my "relationship" with Hank didn't end there. He sent me lots of "friendly" e-mails, that fell into two categories. Here's an example of category number 1:
Have you noticed the sharp increase on your stats page? :) I always knew that ********.com was a hit magnet. :) How is it affecting your bandwidth? Are you getting stuck with extra charges? Our hosting ended up costing more than $400/month right before Y2K. It calmed down a bit after
that. .......
Oh, and you might be pleased to note that I spent some time getting you into the google search engine, if you search the word "********" you come up number one.
I call this the "Look what a great favor I'm doing you" category. Made me a little nervous.
Category number 2 was not addressed directly to me. He would Bcc me on his e-mail diatribes. First, they were diatribes against religion. Then he started sending me diatribes against gun control. Living in a city full of angry people, I was quick to defend gun control, which led to an extended argument, at which point I learned some things about Hank:
1. He doesn't get mad. He just smiles patronizingly.
2. He's very proud of the fact that he doesn't get mad, because he thinks this means he is logical.
3. Because he thinks he is logical, he is quite sure that he is right. All the time.
So, at this point I was not very fond of Hank. What he calls "logic" I call a lack of personality. But he had no problem with my disagreements, and the domain name continued to bring surfers to my site.
The greatest advantage for me was that some people were reading all the way through my web-novel-in-progress. Somewhere between 10 and 20 a month, which really blew me away since this means they read through over 100 web pages.
So that's about 4 months of unmitigated happiness, of smugly knowing I had more hits than anyone else I knew. Until April 20th. That's when I got a category 2 e-mail from Hank. There was one section in particular that really grabbed my attention. He was arguing against a woman's right to not have an abortion! That's gross enough, but it was only the beginning:
Often the male wishes for an abortion, but the female does not. Thus the male is subject to child support payments for 18 years! To make this process more fair, if there is dispute, a "flip of the coin" kind of arrangement should be performed where one will win, while one will lose. I could live with that kind of situation, I can't stand the fact that women wield ultimate power over males, and further minorities now wield ultimate power over white males. White males seem to be the most FUCKED of all human primates at this moment in time, even tho they are the most productive, and have given the world EVERYTHING we have today! Without the white male, people would be in grass huts, carving out scary looking masks for entertainment!
Didja notice how he transitioned from misogyny right into racism? Well, I called him on it. So much for the domain name, I thought. But no. Hank was proud to be a racist. And nothing I said upset him. Nor could I dissuade him in the face of the copious facts and evidence he had collected from White Power brochures and Web sites.
Here was my moral quandary. No one could say I was cowtowing to keep this domain name. My sentiments had been made clear. So I let it ride. It's not like I was doing anything anyway. He was pointing the domain to me. And nothing he had on my Web site was racist, just atheist.
And so, shamefully enough, a full month went by. Then I got a category One e-mail:
Have you checked out the /stats lately? :o) Given a quarter million hits a month, you want to try to generate revenue via this domain (********.com)? We could offer right now, since I maintain the mail service for this domain, mailto:yourname@*******.com, yourname@*******.com redirects, or if your host allows it, pop3 or web based email from your server. I've received a lot of requests for email accounts. Since our hosting costs pushed up to $400 a month prior to Y2K, I'm sure your hosting costs are high right now too, and you also could use some income from it. :o)
So now he wanted to go into business together. The writing was on the wall. My response had none of the rancor of earlier e-mails I'd sent, because I was now resigned to our fate:
It's been a blast, but let's just forget the whole thing. I'm removing your content from my Web site and you can point your domain name wherever you like.
And so I did. I removed every distasteful byte of his content. At first, he questioned why I would do such a thing. He seemed utterly clueless, but I soon clued him in:
The reason for ending this was so that I have no further association with a racist.
Never one to give me the last word, he sent this response, combining categories 1 and 2 and convincing me yet further that I had made the right decision:
Don, keep in mind that if you do not support your race, and if nobody in your race supports your race, your race will be replaced by races that _DO_ support their races. Black power = black dominance. Blacks are currently out-pacing whites in reproduction, and you know this is true, but apparently you don't seem to care. However, after the blacks become dominant, starvation and disease will return their population back to normally small numbers. We saw this after the blacks killed and chased out all the whites in Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and in South Africa. Most important is YOU KNOW this to be true, you are just in denial. :o/
Thank you for sending me the final count. :o) BTW, ending our
relationship has had the greatest impact on you, it did not affect me at all really. Visit http://www.*********.com/ right now and see why. :o) The first month of pointing *********.com at your site you went from 30 thousand hits per month to over 210 thousand hits per month, with the next full month being over 250 thousand hits. Watch now as your hit count reverts back to previous levels. Also note, that even tho you and I disagree, I continued to support your site, and continued to offer you service even tho it was costing me money to do so. DNS service is costing me about $10 a month for that domain due to the heavy traffic. I guess you deleting my pages and discontinuing the relationship proves that I'm the better man, eh? :o) Have a nice life Don, I'm deleting you from my address book, and from my [mailing list], remember well what you have lost.
Yes, Hank, I will remember well what I lost. And I'll do my best to keep it lost. Hell, it's not like the man had "sex.com" or nothing.