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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related - 20+ years ago I managed to register a π domain under one of the primary TLDs.

As in, the registration form was accepted and the fee was charged.

Then, few days after they emailed to say that "due to technical difficulties" the registration can be registered and they have no choice but to unregister it.

I was so close, damn amateurs.

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My brother had a friend who tried to register fuck.com in the early days of the Internet, around 1994, and the registrar was confused and wanted to know why he wanted to register it. This was when the Internet was mostly universities and a .com cost $100 to register.

What was his response? Did they refuse to allow it?

Was that friend Justin Hall of Wired?

There was a story about Jon Postel (pre-ICANN) and fuck.com, this might be it:

https://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.html

Maybe. That sounds like the story he told me. But now I'm wondering if I'm misremembering the friend part. Maybe he read the story when he was posted in 1997 and told me about it.

1994 they were definitely still free[1]. I had so many good ones, but when they switched to the paid model[0] I was a broke college student and let them all go.

[0] IIRC, it was Unilever who caused it -- they mailed in something like 19,000 domain registration applications, one for each of their current trademarks.

[1] OK, I looked it up, September 1995 was when the charging started.

Unilever later bought the domain substance.com from my friend. Remarkably, they apparently later let it lapse and someone else registered it. I'd assumed they were going to have a database of chemical substances that were used as ingredients, or something.

I managed to register a one letter domain below a CC-tld, despite that country having a rule against it. Their signup form had two stages and the check was only on the first page... so all it took was changing a hidden form field.

I had it for a while until they started charging a lot for it (it was Turkmenistan).

I managed to grab a lot of really good[0] emoji domains by bouncing between registrars until you find one that has some poor (good?) coding that lets them slip through.

Then you get stuck a year later when they've upgraded their system and now nothing you do will let you renew it or transfer it...!

[0] "good" is subjective in this context

I did the same. Namecheap was the worst. They'd let me register one then refund me a few days to a week later when someone caught it. That was way worse than just saying no.

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