amused

Ric, I’m sorry I called you a squatter. It just seems your primary “business” is buying domains you don’t use. You said “WordPress dot Com gets a large amount of traffic because people expect it.” If people are expecting the WordPress project and get you, whatever you do, how is that different from phishers who register domains that sound like eBay or PayPal to draw them in? I’m not saying that’s your intention, but that’s what you’d end up doing.

Let’s say you paid $3800 for the domain, why not just ask the WP community for double that, then you’ve made a nice profit with a minimal amount of work and everyone is happy. Agree not to sell it to anyone else while WP.org raises the money and you’ll be painted as the Good Guy who rescued the domain. If you want to “help” that’s the best way. I would happily chip in some of my hard-earned money to the fund to buy the domain back.

If you were just “giving” the domain away with no strings attached, why hasn’t Matt taken it yet? I trust the WordPress developers more than I trust you, so there must be a good reason.

It’s outgoing pingbacks and trackbacks that would slow you down, not incoming. There doesn’t seem to be an option to turn this off in 1.5 though. Maybe there should be a bug for that.

Is the script that generates those public?

Make sure you update your .htaccess file.

Probably shouldn’t feed the troll guys, the guy is obviously just a squatter. I weird squatter, but a squatter nonetheless. I think it could be summed up thusly:

Guy who has never contributing anything to WordPress before buys the .com domain. Instead of doing the noble thing and donating it to the project he seems to think that makes him entitled to be the center of some sort of commercial venture around WordPress. (Read: profit off other people’s work because he squatted a domain, along with hundreds of others it looks like.)

Ric, or whoever you are, it should be obvious the community isn’t going to stand for you making money off them. Just let the devs know how much you paid for the domain and maybe they can run a fundraiser to recoup whatever money you’ve spent already.

If Ric is determined to use the .com commercially and not donate it to the project, then we the users should start a campaign to correct all links that mistakenly go to WordPress.com (using technorati, feedster, google to find them), publicize that no one should do business with him, blacklist the domain, and contact his hosting provider.