Originally published at: Domain names bought on a whim and never used | Boing Boing
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Back in ancient times I owned theinternetsucks.com and my email was itsnotmyfaultth@theinternetsucks.com
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An anecdote: I knew a guy who knew a guy who, back in the 1980s (before the world wide web), when it first became possible for non-orgs to register domain names, went through the (then) arduous process of registering several domain names. His intent was to sit on them and hope that they might become valuable later on, which was by no means assured (kind of like purchasing bitcoin in 2010). According to the story, he registered a bunch of random one-word domains, one of which was green.com. When the dot-com v1 era got going in the mid- late- 1990s, he sold it for a fortune and retired at a relatively young age.
Epilog: I just checked, and that domain seems to be inactive, so it appears that its current owners are still trying to make a buck off it.
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RIP chumpcity.com
Edit: HA! It appears to be some sort of skateboard link/ad aggregation now.
…I wonder if my old email themayor@chumpcity.com still works 
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I have a couple of these gathering dust in a drawer, and there’s another I currently have my eye on. But I can’t tell you what they are without doxing myself.
The problem is the new “stupid” TLDs like .pizza and .corrugated. They’re so cheap and available that it’s hard to resist, but you can’t really use them for anything because the general public can’t deal with sites that don’t own the .com, plus, even though there are too many of them, they’re never quite the ones you want.
But it’s cool that you can get short domains now. I have one that’s only 9 characters including the dot. (Of course, even with the stupid TLDs you pay a chunky premium for anything less than 4 characters)
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I’ve registered one or two goof domain names, but I’ve let them lapse. My best was inspired by a McSweeney’s article: wdoubleudoubleyou.com. And of course the e-mail address that I hung off that was adamatwww@wdoubleudoubleyou.com.
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I’ve starred just keeping them in my shopping cart. I can actually buy them if I build the site first. I haven’t bought any since initiating this system.
Occasionally one gets grabbed. I had my eyes on democracy.rip for years. Debated whether redirecting to the Trump reelection campaign would could as “building the site”. It finally got snatched up last year.
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Although I didn’t own the domain, for a while I had billg@fuckmicrosoft.com.
I have one that’s nine characters not counting the dot and TLD, but it’s also a complete sentence.
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After reading that, I had my eye on bong.rip for about 90 seconds, but I figure I’ll give the suggestion away rather than spend $70 on it
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crumples up hat-based combat game idea and walks away to start a rabbit farm
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Of course the irony is that back then the internet didn’t suck nearly as bad as it does now!
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I’m the proud owner of boobproof.com and wishdrones.com and I cannot wait to monetize them.
I have one that’s only 7.
I probably owned 10 or so in my late 90’s frenzy. I’ve kept 2 of them. I even managed to sell one to a small pharma co. after I informed them I was receiving proprietary emails meant for them due to people using .com and not the pharma’s proper country code at the time.
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I’ve owned several goofy domain names, but only one remains these days which I use as my personal website: trollbreath.com
Yes. Trollbreath. Because if it’s stinky, it must be troll breath…
For a number of years I owned hotitaliansubs.com, strictly for a one note joke:
Hot Italian Subs!
But I let it lapse last year, I think.
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We used to have a popular lefty news outlet and at the top of the page, we had the verticals in one column and the signature columnists in the other. So, the climate blogger happened to be next to the LGBTQ section so he was worried that people would think that he was the signature LGBTQ columnist rather than the climate one. Of course, he brought it up on launch day and made a bit of a sink about it, so I got gayclimatologist.com and sent that to his column. Fairly sure I finally let that go. There were some other defensive domain purchases, but they were for anything that had “wonk” in it, because obviously, people would call it “wank” instead.
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I used to have pissheadnerds.com that I used for an old podcast. Used to abbreviate it to PHN. Then a certain website came along and I decided to not renew.
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I will also fess up to something. 5 years ago, Boing Boing linked to an article on why Disney owns the domain muppetfucker.net (Why Disney owns muppetfucker.net | Boing Boing)
And it included the joke that fragglebugger.com is still available, but was then later updated that some anonymous internet user bought it and redirected it to the article.
I kept it all anonymous at the time, but that was me. I let it lapse after a year, though.
I was very proud of myself for snapping it up so fast.
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I have about a dozen of these lying around for various reasons including the two versions of my real name that I use.
The most recent buy a month or so ago was shittr.net for my right-wing-free-speech outhouse project that I will never actually do anything with.
Over the years it has worked out well since I sold three domains for a total of around 12K which has more than covered the cost of keeping all the others.
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