captainsblog | Now available: Kissmyass.com (Reply)

Last summer, in a fit of marketing inspiration and publishing success, I finally decided to lock down my real name as a dot-com domain. I chose Network Solutions because, hey, they've been around forever, I use their whois, and somehow "godaddy" sounded tacky.

Boy have I learned from Network Solutions about tacky.

Just signing up was an adventure in upselling. Did I want the three-year plan? Did I want their SEO service? Could they design the website for me? Did I want fries with that? A thousand clicks of "no" later and 55 dollars poorer, I was good to go.

Then it got worse. After all the nags, I must've missed the uncheck box for contacting me about promotional things, because for the next three months, I got a butt-ton of contacts. Email, phone, you name it. Eventually, I told them to buzz off, which they did, except for Official Whois Contacts.

There are a lot of Official Whois Contacts, as it turns out. Every couple of months, they seem compelled to check in and make me login and verify that I'm not dead, haven't moved house, and oh, do I really want to miss out on optimization for the website I DON'T EVEN HAVE YET?

A month or so ago, I got another friendly reminder from them: my auto-renew would be auto-renewing next month. My what? Yeah, I'd missed that little detail, too, in the fine print and masked by their big pushes for their (I am not making this up) GORILLA MARKETING program.

Here, read the terms I didn't read; these come from the account option section of My Account:

Automatically renew your Service to prevent service interruptions and protect your business.

By choosing auto-renew, the valid payment method on file will be charged at some point ninety(90) days* prior to its expiration date. Your service may be renewed for a shorter term than the term for which you originally purchased your service(s) and you will be charged the current price for each service. Your credit card on file will be charged for the renewal.

If you choose not to automatically renew your Service you will be responsible for manually renewing services prior to expiration.
Service Auto Renew Set All to :ON To turn off, call (866)908-3450

Yup, the lawyer agreed to this. To giving them Carte Blanche (or, more likely, Master Card) to take money out of my checking account any time they want, 90 days before it's due (and the asterisk says they can change that time, presumably to a longer one, any time they want without notice), and you can't turn it off online. No, you have to call the toll-free number, which you and I both know means talking to Sahib who will read me 100 upsell scripts before it gets turned off.

Ah, but there is a better way. As it happens, my debit card expired in the past year, so they sent me an oh-poor-us email this morning telling me that my requested (ha!) transaction could not be processed and that I should go to my account management section.

Which I did, not to give them the magic new numbers, but to see if they had gotten rid of that onerous call-us requirement. Before I could even find out, though, I got yet another nag screen: new challenge questions required!

So, and I am causing a massive security breach here, I made some:

The cut-off word in the first one is "twits," but you probably already knew that.

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So I have simply calendared the real expiry, when I will give them a prepaid credit card drawdown and make them go away for another year. Best of all, I will likely never use the thing beyond keeping anyone else of my real name from using it, so the whole business is a useless exercise. Meanwhile, I have discovered that another domain I'd really like, captainsblog.com, is not being used right now. It's assigned to someone, and doesn't expire until February, but I've checked the site and he's not blogging much at all, and the domain name just refers to the one he is using. I may make him an offer of 100 bucks or so for it just to see if he'll part with it.

Best of all? It's registered through godaddy. You know, the tacky ones I wanted to avoid.