I recently went to renew a domain I own that I was getting notifications about, and discovered that my other two versions of the same domain (i.e. the .net and .org ones) had already expired but I wasn't getting any emails about those! So yeah, double and triple check those notification settings!
How can you even "lose" it. Don't know if this differs for other domains, but for .de-domains you do need an auth code for the transfer.
This code is only generated once you initiate the transfer of a domain to another hoster. Not sure about the mechanics behind it, but if you enter a wrong auth code with the new hoster, the domain will not be transferred.
Not sure if you could bruteforce those codes, but that would still need somebody to start the transfer...
So what happened here? Did he get hacked? Or did he just forget to pay for the domain name and it expired?
edit: If he forgot to pay I can't really feel sorry. If you don't pay for stuff, you'll get it taken from you.
Yeah. You are very correct. I don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy here, but I hope one or two can learn from my misstake to not trust your eyes when it comes to domain ownership. Verify everything and set up multiple notifications and remainders!
Sorry. It’s just a very shitty situation to spend so much time on a open source project and pay for a domain to then see someone being smart enough to clone your project, host it so you won’t be able to distinguish it from the previous page till you lost the ownership of said domain.
I know, it’s all my fault. But I guess I hope it could be a lesson for other people that hosts open source projects. A visual verification/check of a static page is not enough to be sure you own it.
Which is obvious of course. But if it’s “obvious” for you that all of your payment details are properly set up and up to date, a visual check every now and might feel sufficient.
No. It’s definitely my own fault. Notifications was sent to another domain that expired that was created using the “google get a domain, email, docs, sheets whatever at the same time”. Forwarded emails stopped getting forwarded.
Sadly, I usually check my domains every now and then, but because the new owner copy-pasted my site, I couldn’t tell when doing a quick visual check.
It was after the 3 months grace period I realized there was some spam on the page. I reached out to godaddy to get told someone else bought it through their “auction service” once I missed my window and that was it.
So I deserved it, for sure. Just never thought I would end up getting bamboozled, someone copy-paste my site to make it look legit past the grace period.
It might be worth talking to a lawyer about this who is familiar with domain ownership issues and with IP.
I wasn't able to find any registered trademark (in the US) for "brand-colors", "brand-colors.com", or "brand colors", but a very brief look at the ICANN trademark dispute rules did not turn up any requirement that it be a registered trademark. Maybe I just missed that part, but if I didn't you might be able to get it back on trademark grounds.
The usual hard part of this is showing that the person who has the domain registered now is using it in bad faith. In your case, the fact that the first thing they did was put up a copy of your site, almost certainly in violation of copyright, and then changed links to ones to make themselves money from people thinking they were at your site should be enough to easily show bad faith.
It sucks that you can lose your domain over something as trivial as forgetting to update your credit card information. I use Google Domains, and thankfully they are pretty good at notifying me about upcoming events related to my domain.
I lost my domain that way when I was beginning with internet. I set the reminder to my company email, left, and then the notifications stayed to come (and bounce).
All rookie mistakes I learnt from but still painful when you discover at Christmas that your email is not functional.
No it’s not that easy. This was human error. You can setup auto renewal, pay for 10 years in advance, check for email reminders, or set a calendar reminder, or all of the above. Seems OP failed to do all those (though apparently the email forwarded service they were using didn’t work).
Sorry to hear about this. If you don’t have any other recourse, just charge this to experience and move on. Everyone makes mistakes so I hope you take this well.
