GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

PunchyHamster

I have no reason why would anyone use godaddy 10 years ago let alone today

walrus01

The amount of dark patterns in product management (Domain renewal) UI related to selling additional services and general shadiness from godaddy make it a very poor choice as a registrar. Concur with the other person who has no idea why anyone would choose to use it.

nadermx

Godaddy is pretty awful in a lot of things. This doesn't even surprise me. But I will say that their broker services have done me well. But I do transfer domains away as soon as possible to dynadot

kwanbix

> Lee is one of the most competent IT guys I know. And yet he uses GoDaddy?

altairprime

This is a textbook case for suing for compensation and punitive damages. I hope someone opened an arbitration complaint on day one to get the wheels turning. Maybe they’ll consider reviewing https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint (one can dream).

M_bara

And that is why I’d rather work with a smallish and responsible registrar like porkbun - this is after I lost a domain from a “cheap name” registrar. Personal experience, no relationship to either registrar listed above

DetroitThrow

Another example of a long list of stories where GoDaddy practically destroys decades of business trust for a customer by just ripping their domain away for no reason. What an awful company.

acdha

They’ve been like that since the turn of the century. This is like eating every meal at McDonald’s and wondering why your health is suffering.

TZubiri

"Lawyers would have gotten involved" Oh, please do. Mistakes happen, and the scale of GoDaddy means that even rare mistakes will happen. But they may still be liable for damages, how much is the reputational damage, and the possible lost business? Why wouldn't you go this route?

esskay

I've heard this story before...in fact I've heard it several times, and funnily enough each time it involved GoDaddy. Stop. Using. Them.

donatj

Probably ten years ago with name.com I had a .at domain expire. I caught it like a day or two later, and successfully renewed it through their site but it did not take. There was somehow already someone up squatting my domain. I contacted support and they told me there's apparently no renewal window for .at but they could recover it for $140 - oof .. sure. It was nothing super important but would be annoying to lose. Then it took like a week for them to get back to me, but after that week I got my domain back. I have no idea what gymnastics happened on their side.

omnifischer

Wait few hours. Some CTO or PR guru will post a message here. - We are totally revamping our processes. This never happened out of incompetence. Humans make mistakes. We are contacting the client for 1 year free renewal - waiving. Will mail a coupon code. We consider this issue closed.

FlamingMoe

He mentions these 3: "- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong. - Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect. - All of the SEO is gone." but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify the login."

trollbridge

At the risk of sounding snarky; Last Saturday afternoon one of his client’s domains vanished from his GoDaddy account. Lee is one of the most competent IT guys I know. 'Competent' and 'client's domains [hosted on] GoDaddy' don't go together.

jrflowers

This reminds me of when a friend’s website inexplicably disappeared and was replaced with a redirect to an ad for some GoDaddy ai website builder and support couldn’t explain how that happened other than “the nameservers were changed” despite the fact that the account hadn’t had any logins for over a year.

namegulf

Most of the issues we've seen in the past are due to payment failures, credit card declined, etc., that let the domain goto auction and lose access. This is all new and from the content of the post looks like due to an employee error in transferring the wrong domain and they don't have a process to address the situation. Corporates have a huge blind spot and everything with them is just a process and this case the process completely failed. Unfortunately everytime it's the customer who suffers.

hackan

When is people gonna stop using that crap name server?? What else needs to happen? GoDaddy is a scam!

maz1b

Wow, that is insanely atrocious. I'll look into moving off any remaining domains away from GoDaddy.

parham

I’ve successfully saved many people suffering with godaddy. As soon as the word is mentioned I tell them the horror stories. Saving this to the bucket of stories.

tedggh

Likely an inside job. I had a similar experience with AWS where my account was compromised despite the fact that I had all the proper security features enabled. It was later discovered internal contractors were responsible. But up to that point AWS blamed the issue on me with no proof. A call to the AG office in my state got the ball rolling and initiated an investigation that finally got a manager to take the case seriously.