cschidle

When you hand over $250 and they hold it for 3 months with the promise of giving you a shot at an auction, then they cancel the auction... I still call that a "switch".

Still haven't received the refund, by the way.

Right on. While I said "I appreciate a good name", I'm truly a sucker for a good name. Branding is huge, even when it's a personal brand.

So yes, a one-time fee of $250-$1,000 feels ok to me, especially considering what Automattic paid for the TLD.

The reply I received from get.blog support (last image in the post) stated that "chris.blog ended up being part of the list of reserved domains that are not available for registration". So I imagine they'll either keep it internal or sell it as a premium domain.

I was being generous when I wrote that line. But I maintain that clearly stating it will go to auction then pulling the auction is a "switch".

Right. Just a few years ago "check out as guest" wasn't very common, but it has become popular because stores realize that most people don't want to create yet another account.

Unfortunately, these cash back gimmicks get value-minded people like me to sign up, but in this case it's severely abused.

The customer service stuff is certainly bad, but I find the data collection stuff appalling. More and more retailers think it's ok to ask for and store personal info under the guise of "social networking". Hidden unsubscribe options and "public by default" profiles (for a retail store!) are just evil.

Never mind. It was just the Droid Serif fallback font. I feel rather silly.

A redesign was speculated and I started seeing this around 5:30pm, but I don't see any other mentions. Is anyone else seeing this? Looks like a pretty significant redesign.