tl;dr: A large domain registrar purchased a domain they knew I was interesting in buying, costing me $500. In response, I taught myself how to make a web app, programmed a competitor, and then reached out to a company that was going to purchase a ton of domains via the large domain registrar, and convinced them to use mine instead.First, some context: I’m a broke high school freshman with a penchant for web design. A month ago, a friend’s dad asked me to design a small site for his business, offering $100. Not shabby. $100 translates to an entire summer of Netflix and Rick and Morty. Or two Nintendo Switch games. Or a few sushi dinners. Safe to say, despite finals week fast approaching, I obliged and earnestly cobbled together some HTML/CSS to make a nice looking site for my friend’s dad. One day into the development of this site, I got an email from my friend’s father explaining how he just discovered this newfangled emoji domain name technology, and he wanted me to implement it into his site. Not only that, but he now wanted his site to be emoji themed, in order to cater to us “millennials”. He also claimed he “conducted” research into the “inner-workings of websites” (as he put it), and said he wanted me to handle the purchase of the domain and the hosting of the website. For these new duties, he offered me $500. $500! That’s essentially a lifetime subscription to Netflix! It’s 25 sushi dinners! It’s 10 Nintendo Switch games! Hell, if I lived in the Mushroom Kingdom, that’d amount to 5 additional lives — that’s what $500 is to me — the value of 5 more lifetimes.Anyways, despite how /r/fellowkids-esque I understood this emoji-centric request to be, I acquiesced, and researched how to stick emoji domain names into the url of every person who visited his site. I eventually found a site operated by the bastards over at "Large Domain Registrar" (but, well, I didn’t know they were bastards at the time) that was made to help you register emoji domain names. For this next part, in case you weren't aware, it’s important that you understand that each domain name can only be owned by a single person at a time.Alright, so first things first, I went to check the availability of the motherfucking string of hieroglyphics that my friend’s dad wanted to repurpose as a domain name. Sure enough, it was available to be registered (no surprise there really, the domain he wanted was long, convoluted, and pretty shitty if I do say so myself. No other human being would choose this domain for their website. Ever). I used the "Large Domain Registrar" (henceforth called LDR) affiliated emoji site to add it to my cart, but have to leave my laptop for 20 or so minutes to eat dinner. I figure I’ll just purchase it in a half hour, it’ll still be available then, right? Wrong. Because as it turns out, LDR has a history of sniping domain names it knows you’re interested in before you get the chance to buy them, and then tries to sell them to you at an exorbitant mark-up weeks later. I try to explain the circumstances to my friend’s dad when I find out his precious domain has been sniped, but he isn’t having it. He calls off the transaction entirely. There isn’t much I can do. I blame my friend's dad in part, but know at heart that the true villainous scoundrel here is LDR. So I hatch my plan to take revenge on the maniacal corporation that cost me $500 - five hundred dollars that I could’ve put towards a Netflix subscription for watching Rick and Morty. I spend the next few days learning how to develop a web app (I usually just develop static webpages) using NodeJS/Express. A week goes by. I eventually reach a point where I’m able to replicate the functionality of the emoji domain registration website. I reach out to one of LDR's rival and main competitor and manage to get an affiliate partnership with their company. I design a layout that is visually superior to its LDR counterpart. And finally I publish the site at the domain https://domainoji.com. But that alone wasn’t enough for me.Thanks to some Twitter snooping, I catch word of a potential sale of a large amount of emoji domain names to a domain reseller. They intend to purchase the domains via the LDR affiliate website, but I’m not going to sit back and watch as LDR's CEO gets $1000 closer to their 23rd private yacht. I contact this reseller immediately. I explain my story to them and link them to other horrid accounts of dealings with LDR. The reseller was convinced - they no longer has any plans of doing any business with LDR. They subsequently asked me I knew of any other reputable dealers. With the disclaimer that it was my own site, I referred them to https://domainoji.com. The rest is history. So that's the story of how I fucked LDR out of ~$1000 and managed to make a few hundred bucks myself while I was at it. via /r/ProRevenge http://ift.tt/2sevGb3
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