I bought https://m8.fyi because I wanted a URL shortener to use for my work - it's hard to expect someone to type out "https://datacrayon.com/posts/plotapi/showcase/pokemon-types-..." from a GIF/MP4.

I thought it was good at the time, i.e. "Mate, for your information...", e.g. "m8.fyi/something". However... it seems that many people don't recognise "m8.fyi/item" as a URL!

> In Warhammer 40K, the Orks faction have a big robot called a Stompa, but in French it gets translated as ‘Krabouillator’ for some reason. The Stompa looks nothing like a crab, so nobody remembers why it got translated to ‘Krabouillator.’

Stompa is another way to spell stomper. krabouillator would have been obvious to any French speaking person as meaning ecrabouilleur, or one that stomp. A far cry from crab (or crabe if you are a French speaker).

Weird the author didn't try to even investigate that.

Some that I bought:

https://xn--ujdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

https://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

http://mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Why? They're the widest domains you can get within the character limits. Good for testing UI for bad wrapping with long data. Hacker News handles it pretty well.

Years ago, in my younger, I thought I was extremely funny days, I bought yomamashouse.com simply so I could own the email address of im@yomamashouse.com.

I let it expire.

When SASS (the CSS compilation framework) was a thing I registered "sassrobot.com" thinking I might make a little microsite to help other devs with it.

I never got around to launching the site, but it did lead to the most horrifying auto-generated by a domain squatter email that I think anyone has ever received.

https://twitter.com/mbuckbee/status/1365062949044424708

Back in university, some students (or was it only one?) put lots of effort into making a thing of the "Rautavistic University of Eschweilerhof". At that time, Eschweilerhof in Germany had only a population of 70 (now, its more like 71) and definitely had nothing that resembled a physical university. However, they wanted to come as close as possible to a real university and obviously having a web page was part of it: http://www.uni-eschweilerhof.de/ (in German).

I have just visited this URL for the first time in 20 years and it's gorgeous.

Excitedly bought pjg.com.au off the drop list. Because of the underline on the link, I assumed it was pig.com.au. Realised my mistake and made a list of companies with the initials PJG, pitched them, and sold the domain for 10x what I paid. Not worth the hassle all up! Looks like it's lapsed and been bought by a domainer since.

My home town is too small to have a zoo. I bought a domain that makes it look like there is, which makes me proud owner of the veterinarian@ email address. I also had a lot of fun taking a free design template and combine it with Creative Commons zoo animal photos.

I did my first internship in IT in 1999 and worked for the predecessor of NTT Data in Germany. They generously offered me some domains for free "for lifetime".

Somewhen in the mid-2000s, I decided to add another domain to my account: "sonneausdemarsch.de" (sunshine out of the arse.de). Unluckily, they noticed I'm no longer on their paylist and they cancelled the subscription completely.

So long, my "lifetime" account :(

This is also how I lost marienkinder.de (marienkinder being a technophobic christian cult with the most hilarious pamphlet brochures you can imagine.

Ah, those were the times :D

I used to own hairwaytosteven.org. Wish I did more with it. Such is life. Edit: copy pasta cleanup.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150801140916/http://hairwaytos...

“It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.”

— Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview

I held on to rubygetsrailed.com for well over a decade without ever doing anything useful on it.

Back when I was in college in the mid 2000s, some people found a key in the grass outside one of the dorms. They set up a website with a photo of the key and sent the link to the general "HelpMe" mailing list.

As a tiny Pandemic project, I bought the domain and resurrected the site (from the Internet Archive's copy) for the nostalgia.

https://wefoundthiskey.com/

I bought "butterwank dot com" a few years ago (it sounds worse to British ears) because I noticed I kept getting phone calls from the registrar's sales team offering me web design services for domains I'd registered. I wanted to see if they would call up and ask me what line of business "butterwank" was in because it would be worth the $10 of entertainment to yank their chain. They never called!

I used to own “taps.af” based on a way you might describe the weather in some parts of Scotland - if it’s warm it’s “taps aff” (tops/shirts off) weather. It checked your location, fired off an API call to some service and showed either AYE or NAW (yes/no) depending on whether it was over 20°C in that location. It’s gone now (the .af domain was pricey for a joke service) but there’s screenshots at https://blog.mclemon.org/taps-aff

Back in the old days, I had iam.coop (my work nickname at the time) for a few weeks. It turns out that when domain registrars say they’re going or check your eligibility, they mean it. I failed. They took it back. For two glorious weeks my email address was hello@iam.coop

There's a popular web comic called questionable content where a running gag of the author is to buy bizarre offensive domain names for his comic:

questionablecontent.net

boner.moe

fart.computer

dildo.pizza

ass.golf

mydickandballs.com

dong.zone

butt.church

sexual.fish

unionrobotics.net

69.bingo

poop.rodeo

boners.lol

piss.farm

swole.dog

burgerking.sex

powerful.dog

cum.energy

qc.bike

rectal.dentist

questionablecontent.horse

"krabouillator" likely comes from écrabouiller in French (colloquial/childish, to stomp and smash) that phonetically (and in young children) could be misheard or mispronounced as "krabouiller".

Source: was 5

One night a few months ago, after two large beers I imagined up a domain name that was SO PERFECT that I HAD TO BUY IT and swore that this time, unlike all the others, I was TOTALLY GOING TO DO SOMETHING WITH IT.

The next morning, looking for an excuse to not get out of bed, I actually followed through:

https://haikupotamus.com/

I grabbed 10x.guru back in the day, so that the next time someone said they need a 10x engineer, they can just ask their computer whois 10x.guru

My wife's ex was college buds with a guy who bought fuck.org back in 1999. I know he's been offered upwards of $1 million for it, probably more by now, but he's never given it up. My wife even got an email address out of it, though she doesn't use it. Dude's never even bothered to put up a web site. It's still just a single html file that says "fuck you" in the metadata.

I own https://56k-modem.online I think it's pretty cool.

I’ve owned localho.st for 20-odd years.

I brought geethub.com (a misspelling of Github.com) and have setup a redirect to Github from it. :)

https://geethub.com/

The Yes & No monogram in our studio’s identity is also the URL – ꑮ.com. We repurposed a Unicode A46EYI glyph (Yi Syllable XYP).

https://xn--bj8a.com (ꑮ.com)

(For instance, all versions of Safari display the symbol in the address bar.)

I have https://lbjfacts.com, which is a site full of.. definitely real facts about Lyndon B Johnson.

I was just really bored one day, and it started as an inside joke that just kind of kept going.

A while back I registered a couple of domains to use when store clerks asked me to supply an email address.

They were of the form:

notmyrealemailaddress.com thisistotallyfake.com inevercheckthisaccount.com

But joke's on me, because then there would be this long, drawn-out process of "How do you spell that? Are there hyphens between the words? Did you say 't' as in 'toy' or 'b' as in 'boy'? Now let me read that back to you."

Tried to buy onlyflans.com for a joke site about egg tarts, the squatter wanted $5k for it which was a bit steep.

I managed to snag https://temporary.directory as my personal site. Good stuff.

In the midst of the inflated claims in the first dot com boom I bought itsjustafuckingwebsite.com and had a simple piece of text in the middle saying “That’s all it is.” It helped keep me sane in the middle of all the ridiculous hype.

Not sure if I qualify but I own https://searchableguy.com

I wanted a unique username that would let people find me on google and social media but whatever I entered, it was already taken so being frustrated - I typed in searchableguy and it was available.

Many years ago I had occasion to register networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. The story of how that happened is here:

https://big-fat-honking-weenies.blogspot.com/

[UPDATE] Hah! The domain is available again!

I have a domain that I bought many years ago. I've had people call me on the phone to question me about it, and some people have even come to my house to see if I'm a real person because of it. It's a fun one.

Type "illuminati" backwards, and add a ".com" :)

Recently I purchased 'jinseo.kim'.

It's formatted like <first name>.<last name>. I love it.

One of my favorite domain purchases was them.us

But I got an offer I didn’t want to refuse and sold it…

Tem years ago a friend and I arranged the FOSCON event, which was the free OSCON for people who couldn't afford that conference. O'Reilly was happy to collaborate with us by the way.

We had an event where DHH and a bunch of other cool people came out to support us.

As the MCs, we pretended to be the founders of a new company that was going to take on Twitter and Kevin Rose's new Pownce. We had slides between each presentation with awful marketing buzzwords and tried to appear as clueless as possible. We would ask people to quiet down and say things like "Listen, we paid a lot of money for this sponsorship..."

Omitting vowels was all the rage. We called our company:

Sqkwzr.com

(Can you believe that domain was free?)

The company took the concept of Twitter to a whole new level, where you could "tweet" out your farts and things like that automatically. We had a slide with each egress point labeled with hex addresses like 0xa55.

The tagline in the slides was: "every orifice has a story to tell."

Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu founder) was at OSCON that year and I approached him to see if he would attend and pretend he was an investor. I still have the email where he declined.

If you want even stranger TLDs, look at OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/projects/ There's all sorts of weird gTLDs:

https://www.opennic.chan/

https://be.libre/

You can create your own gTLD as long as you follow the rules:

https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds

I'm not massively into the whole wsb thing but I found it funny so I got the emoji domain diamond-hand-rocket-moon.ws

Back in my late teens/early twenties me and some friends talked about starting an industrial band (think Neubauten...) and calling it Slashignore.

I now own slashignore.it for our break through, any year now...

I’ve been sitting on tabvs.space for a while now.

some time during a long night of talking about dumb shit with friends, I became the proud owner of http://thedarkweb.online.

some day… some day I will figure out the right joke for that page.

I've bought a lot of silly ones over the years. When 'enterprises' TLD opened, I couldn't believe that criminal.enterprises wasn't taken yet, so I snagged it. Although I found myself reluctant to actually use it on a website (could be nice for a game though), I did end up redirecting it to a certain ex-president's organization, but only a few hundred people ever noticed.

>That goes double for @NNekoru’s friend, who owned suspicious.link.

I'm incredibly jealous

https://loda.sh

I used to own cheeseonthemoon.com, it was one of my first websites back in high school and I just goofed off trying to be funny. It's still on archive.org where you can read about my theory (misinformation?) that there is cheese on the moon. There was a forum where me and a few friends would discuss random topics.

Long ago, I wanted to make a microservice that uses choon.to as the domain, pointing to popular shoutcast streams. The goal was to have a regular HTML webpages with the stream info served when using a browser, but send HTTP redirects to the actual Shoutcast stream source when media players being used to open the same URL. I thought having to paste into Winamp/Foobar2000 "http://choon.to/difm-trance" * was more user-friendly (or marketable?) than a bunch of numbers like "http://12.34.56.78:8888".

*: Although I was more of a di.fm Trance listener back then, another Trance channel, Afterhours.fm, still uses choon.in today as their shortcut domain.

> www.assfart.gas

Weird, because there is no “.gas” TLD.

I bought “Format18.io” for my https://SimpleLocalize.io project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format18

When the '.xxx' TLD first came online, I bought 'brownchickenbrowncow.xxx' hoping to squat on it until some porn companies came around making offers. But alas, they never did, so I let it expire. I don't know what the heck I was thinking.

I had emperor.io for years, used it for misc projects, email, etc... got contacted to sell it recently and ended up letting it go.

originally bought it to host a error reporting platform back in 2014 or something, but never finished the project, as is tradition.

I think I have 7-8 domain names on Namecheap for projects I want to do but never finished?

The icelandic domain 'mypen' caused much mirth in combination with https://www.isitdownrightnow.com

For a few drunken minutes at least.

I have gleet.com just so I can make businesses e-mail me there.

And I registered recoveredlover.com to forward e-mail to my friends who'd already had Covid, back when they were the only people who could safely socialize.

Ah yes, I drunkenly made https://nicetik.tk one evening. The .tk TLD is actually free, and hosting it on github is free as well!

I shall contribute mine: https://porkskank.com/

Nothing but a single photo of a dude with a bag of beans on his head.

I have grainislife.com which has nothing to do with wheat, barley, seeds of any kind, or agriculture of any sort. Nor does it have anything to do with the unit of mass.

special mention to tfwno.gf from the very politically incorrect cock.li (who also owns aaathats3as.com and a few others I probably shouldn't mention here)

Slightly related, I have a bunch of domain names I don't necessarily need -- acquired in the same vein as in the article (jokes, failed/abandoned projects, ...) -- and would be interested in selling them somehow if possible. Is there any general advice for how one goes about this? Is it just parking pages and hoping someone stumbles across them? Or is there a more-specific marketplace or something of the like?

A lifetime of suffering in the desert led me to create https://www.ihateaz.com

I bought derivadev.com about 6 years ago - I was going to create a site that was just full of (working) code snippets for all of the little problems I've had to solve over the years (think stackoverflow without the comments and wrong answers).

As with many other things, I never got around to making it...

edited to add: Since most of my development work seems to be a derivative of some earlier project, it seemed apt

20 years ago I bought CThreePO.com hoping to sell it to a Star Wars fan. Nobody wanted it. I still own it. I used it to host my essays and blog about science fiction. It is now hosted on my home machine and the things that used PHP no longer work. Many pages are orphaned. I count about 8,000 pages, although google no longer spiders most of them.

I used to own hitlerballs.com, inspired by this comic.[0] Couldn't really find a use for it. Looks like the current owner is trying to sell it for a profit, lol.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1621

I've been the proud owner of whalevagoo.com. One of these days when I have time I'll do something good with it.

I used to work for a domain registrar, and was constantly buying new domains to test things out. I've since let almost all of them lapse. I think my favorite was "gravlaxandfailure.com" (an Archer reference).

I bought a few cool domains over the past couple of years for side projects: wrestle.buzz, scots.app, jazzkeys.fyi and jamieonkeys.dev. My favourite (joke) domain is Marco Arment’s bad.coffee :D

I wish I were this creative; I've mostly bought domains that are variations of my name/last name, and the only one I haven't let die is my usual username luord.com

I bought onetwoseven.one for the sole purpose of sending one silly email as "root@onetwoseven.one" to somebody.

I'll probably get some real mileage out of it at some point.

I own fullofcr.app and flab.by. No idea what to do with them.

Having always been a fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic, I briefly owned https://weird.al

Ahh go on, here is my contribution:

http://www.ireallylikechicken.com/

My two favorite that I own are sw8.link and snack.dev

I picked up tendies dot ca just for the silly email address. A few weeks later I got a purchase request for 420 USD - I said no.

I picked up hairygum.com a few years back as a joke for a friend who like to play the hairy gum trick in his high school days.

I registered dunderstruct.com on a whim but I don't think I'll find much use for it, though.

I had clueserver.com for a while in the 90s, but never did anything with it and it lapsed.

I run a B2B marketplaces and when we were just starting out I got lordofordering.com

I owned stdarg.com back in the late 90s, early 00s. Never used it and let it lapse.

I own kubernetees.com, because that's the way my former boss used to say it.

Used to own software-engineering.blog. Big plans on it. Not anymore

I thought I was very clever registering `justthetippett.com`.

I owned duckduckno.com for a few years. Lots of typo hits.

> johngalt.com [Ed. note: named after the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead]

Editor, Atlas Shrugged, please.

rossneedstowat.ch

Shows my friend Ross needs to watch, but stubbornly hasn't.

boreh.am , hence d@boreh.am

incompetent.management

fraudulent.marketing

http410.com

I own a ton of joke domains... and tons of nerd domains.

A few...

fscking.com whoreanddecore.com inyourbumbum.com imgoingtofu*kyourmom.com limhoe.com limhos.net eatoutatyourmom.com

and