For a bunch of years in the late 1990's, I had lenpal.com as a vanity site and a sort of online magazine (with articles written by myself and some friends). It got a modest amount of hits at first, but they were mostly just from friends and family. (The website also included a blog about my daughter's medical issues at the time as a sort of self-therapy and a way to keep folks up to date on what was going on without having to actually repeat the same information eleventy-billion times.)
Some time in late 1999 I wrote a script that crawled some bartending sites and added every drink recipe it could find into a database. I set up an interface where a user could mark off the ingredients they had on hand, and then get a list (with recipes) of all the drinks they could make with the stuff they had. I wasn't even the first website to do that (although I didn't know it at the time), but still, the site blew up -- at least by my standards, regularly getting over 10,000 hits a day and sometimes over 20,000.
But then during my divorce (and resulting financial issues), I let the domain go for a while. I figured, "Who would want a domain named after me anyway? I can just buy it again later." Except that was absolutely not how things played out. After a few months, someone sent me an e-mail saying I should check it, and sure enough it had become the landing page of a porn site. Someone somewhere figured out that since I was getting a lot of traffic, they could redirect that traffic to boobies and make some money for a while. Pretty embarrassing, but whatever... how long would they bother? The traffic would die down eventually.
And so once every six months or so, I'd check to see if the domain was available. After a couple of years, the porn site was gone, but the domain itself was owned by some entity that initially wanted $10,000 for it. Over the years that price gradually dropped: the last time I looked at it a year or two ago, it was at about $2000. I checked it again recently and it was available for regular retail price, so I snatched it back up. FINALLY. I don't even know whether I even *want* a website right now, but it's the principle of the thing. And at least I have my lenpal.com e-mail address back. So there's that!
TL;DR my website domain was held for ransom for two decades and it's finally mine again.
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