Click below to go to the World of Longplays site
What is this site about?
Here's the story:
In August 2018 HostEurope took down our website due to unpaid bills.
This happened because Geekmeister - the owner of the site/domain - had disappeared a year earlier.
Any way trying to contact him failed.
This inevitably meant that the site data was going to get deleted and the domain would expire.
Thanks to our new website admin Asnivor, we managed to recover the site from backups
and got it back up running at a new temporary domain: www.longplays.eu.
The longplays.org domain was monitored and we were waiting patiently for it to expire so we could snap it up immediately.
This is a lengthy process with lots of waiting periods so that the owner of the domain can still get their domain back if it has expired in error.
However, as soon as the domain was officially released in April/May 2019, one of the domain registrars (likely GoDaddy or one of their subsidiary companies) bought and parked
the domain without it ever being made available to the public.
At this point we engaged a 3rd party domain broker to negotiate with the new owner in an attempt to purchase the domain, but there was apparently no response to any communication
attempts over the course of a month, proving ultimately fruitless.
In July 2019 we decided to try the same thing through GoDaddy's own "Domain Broker" service. Godaddy managed to contact the 'owner' within a few short days, and came back with an asking price of $7500 (+20% commission).
The GoDaddy agent suggested offering $2500 as a start - which we did. The agent then returned and told us the owner now wanted $7800.
We had no choice but to buy it at the high price, which came to a total of: 11,579.83 USD / 9,984.22 EUR.
Have a look at the invoice here:
As of August 1st, we finally became the owner of our own domain again!
Due to the high cost, please consider supporting our little museum at Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/World_of_Longplays
Here is an example of the sort of wonderful weird game content that you are supporting: