| Yesterday, GoDaddy's website did no filtering of .me names that were already taken. You could sign up and pay for anything and they would charge the card and they would send a confirmation message. They let their backend do all the filtering and sorting of what names were available and who got first dibs. Then they sent out those emails that let us know that our registrations succeeded or failed.
This confirmation email + later registration succeeded / failed email is the way GoDaddy always works. The only stinky part is keeping our money for 24 hours - but maybe if some buyers cannot pay then we might get a 3rd email that says that we got the domain after all.
When you think about it, although they COULD have at least filtered out the names that are going to auction, like the complaint about 'forum.me' on another thread, but the rest of the names... their availability was changing so fast, even if they did the right thing - if website showed it was available it would be meaningless as microseconds later it was likely to be taken.
The bigger scam is keeping the money for 2700 names going to auction at, say, 10 people for each auction times $100 which adds up to $2.7M for 2 months or so. |