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More on my Twitter.sucks reg

Kevin Murphy, December 21, 2015, 07:51:32 (UTC), Domain Registries

If you were reading on Friday, you’ll know that I brought about the registration of the domain twitter.sucks and took charge of a web site hosted at that address.
I hinted that there was a little more to the story, but couldn’t get into it.
The first part of the story is here.
What I didn’t mention was that twitter.sucks was in my This.sucks account for probably less than 10 minutes before I removed it.
I have no beef with Twitter and no particular desire to moderate a .sucks discussion forum.
After removing twitter.sucks from my account, I noticed that This.sucks again gave me the option to “register” a free .sucks domain.
So I experimentally “registered” thisdotsucks.sucks too.
Again, the domain started resolving, showed up in Whois, and the associated WordPress site went live within seconds.
At this point, I discovered that I had admin privileges for both twitter.sucks and thisdotsucks.sucks sites simultaneously.
Suspecting that I may have found a bug that would allow anyone to register an essentially unlimited number of free and potentially trademark-matching .sucks domains, I informed This.sucks of my findings in the interest of responsible bug disclosure and ended my blog post prematurely.
Late Friday, This.sucks spokesperson Phil Armstrong told me that it wasn’t a bug after all.
He said that the company allows one “do-over”. So if you register a name for free, then delete it, you get another one for free.
He also said that WordPress admin privileges for domains removed from user accounts expire after a period (I had admin rights for the twitter.sucks web site for roughly 48 hours after I deleted it from my account.)
Right now, the domain twitter.sucks still exists, registered to This.sucks as before, as does the associated web site. I have no idea if another user has taken over its administration or if it’s in some kind of limbo state.
All I know is that it’s nothing to do with me any more.

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Comments (3)

  1. Louse says:

    Interesting experiment. Aren’t you nervous of associating with a potential trademark domain?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Not particularly. I was never the registered name holder, and there was self-evidently never any bad-faith intent.
      UDRP panels have had mixed views about domains containing trademarks that are used for comment or criticism.
      The domain also appears to have been deleted now — during the add grace period, I believe — which is kinda what I expected to happen.

  2. Antoine CALLOCH says:

    Looks like domain names that have been canceled, such as twitter.sucks or sanofi.sucks, are no longer available for free “You are trying to register a premium site.” .
    Register domain names with this.sucks and instantly withdraw might be the solution for PI holders ?

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