phobiaforum[dot]com

[MAllie]

I would be glad for any appraisals of phobiaforum.com and phobiasforum.com.

Also, does anyone have an opinion as to which would be the better one to use as the main developed one? I like the sound of the first one better, but the second might more truly represent what the forum would be about, i.e., lots of different phobias.

[Bionic]

singular for sure. Great to develop with obvious subforums.

I'm an arachnophobe myself, but much better with small spiders atleast. The discussions should be very interesting!

[WhoDatDog]

Good names. Like the above poster, I believe the singular is the better name to develop....then forward the plural to it. PhobiaForum.com is a very good name. Forum names are tricky to sell, but I don't think you should take less than low X,XXX for it if you decided to sell. It is the type of name you renew forever, or develop, as you wait for a real-money offer one day. You could get lucky with this name and get 4-5k if the stars align, or if you seached out to some end-users with similar sites who might want the category killer name to re-brand their site with.

[MAllie]

Thanks so much, Bionic and WhoDatDog. I actually only found the name after beginning to set up arachnophobiaforum.com. My son thought this was a little long and wondered if the main one was gone. Maybe this isn't the place to ask, but if I develop phobiaforum how exactly do I 'forward the plural' to the singular? I've heard about this but am not sure of the process. If the answer is too technical, don't worry, I'll look in the web development area of the site.

Anyway, your responses are very much appreciated.

[WhoDatDog]

If you go to the control panel where your names are listed at your registrar you will see that you can forward any name to any site. This is the same principle that businesses use when they forward typos of their sites.

For example, if you type in Gogle.com, it is forwarded to Google.com. If you owned a poker site you would want to forward names that had poker traffic to your site. Same thing if you owned the singular and plural. You are trying to capture all intended traffic, and if someone is looking for PhobiaForum.com and they accidentally type in PhobiasForum.com then the forwarding corrects their mistake for them.....they end up landing where they intended even though they didn't type in PhobiaForum.com.

This is also why people who direct typos of trademarked sites to their own sites for their traffic are often looked down on (by some). They are capitalizing on traffic that is intended to go somewhere else. The flip side of that is that Google, MSN, etc also profit from that same mistake that people make. Each person draws their own line on how far they will go. I often see people complain when someone registers a domain related to a recent tragedy. Those who register those names are trying to capitalize on the traffic that is generated from the spike in interest. However, the people who complain about that don't complain about newscasts or television shows doing specials on the same topics and getting higher ratings (and profiting from the tragedy).

Whatever attracts interest and eyeballs will attract people looking to capitalize on it. I figured I'd talk about those other areas a bit even though your question was a more basic one.

[MAllie]

Oh, that's most interesting, WhoDatDog. I will check out GoDaddy's control panel. Thanks again!