Ask the Bear & Badger - The Bear and Badger

Diluted Dante

If someone were to look at buying a building, what might they need to know?

Armitage_Shankburn

What's your annual ROI? Here it's 4.25%, which isn't much. What's your likelyhood of getting a change of use PP, to residential, which is presumably what they're getting at for the top floors. What's the cost of getting there, so you can fleece students and kick that ROI up to somewhere like 8% (if you get 16k pa net)

Then you flip the property for a million to someone who just wants to be rentier, and maybe it's a couple of year's work part time but you've made, say, 200k for your efforts after expenses.

You then spunk that on crypto and hang yourself

monkey

A domain registered to the gf's business website was set up through GoDaddy, and for some reason, that GoDaddy account had an email address registered for her that has never existed. God knows how that was allowed to happen. You'd have thought the address would have had to have been verified initially.
Anyway, domain now expired as we weren't getting the renewal emails. And apparently the domain has since been bought up. She's shit the bed and said we should use the broker service that GoDaddy suggested. I'm saying don't even bother, someone's hoovered that up to try and make a quick buck and you're going to pay a broker just to give you a stupid price for getting it back, which you then won't pay. Anyone used these brokers? It's just a con right?

There's nothing special about the URL and it can be easily changed to something similar with only lightweight hassle in updating a few things to point to a new one.

dynamiteReady

monkey wrote:

A domain registered to the gf's business website was set up through GoDaddy, and for some reason, that GoDaddy account had an email address registered for her that has never existed. God knows how that was allowed to happen. You'd have thought the address would have had to have been verified initially. Anyway, domain now expired as we weren't getting the renewal emails. And apparently the domain has since been bought up. She's shit the bed and said we should use the broker service that GoDaddy suggested. I'm saying don't even bother, someone's hoovered that up to try and make a quick buck and you're going to pay a broker just to give you a stupid price for getting it back, which you then won't pay. Anyone used these brokers? It's just a con right? There's nothing special about the URL and it can be easily changed to something similar with only lightweight hassle in updating a few things to point to a new one.

Yeah, that sounds like a hustle.

As for the email address, hackers can sometimes do very subtle things with domain name characters, so you might want to check that.
Nothing wrong with engaging the broker, especially if the domain is doing gangbuster numbers. But I'd say just encourage the wife to look for a new domain name, and be weary of what can happen in the future.

monkey

It's just a small local business with a static website that needs updating once every few months. Website gets about 100 visits a week. Not sure how it's even that many. It's been down for a couple of weeks and no one that works there has even noticed.

dynamiteReady

Also, do a `whois` lookup (us this site - https://www.whois.com/whois/, if you don't have access to a *nix environment that has it built in), and find out who exactly has the address. You could possibly approach them directly, but I think these domain scams are done on an industrial scale.

At least it will give you a name to place on the bellend, so to speak.

monkey

Yeah tried that. It's weird, it's still showing as expired from the end of last month. So maybe the sale went through quite recently and it hasn't updated??

dynamiteReady

That's not so weird (someone may have bought the name, but not gone through nameserver registration). But if the whois details are still yours, then that would be a bit odd. But unless anyone has any further info (Muzzy), it's very hard to scam the DNS system. If someone's bought the name, then there's very little that can be done.

One side point... I'd read a number of times that GoDaddy is a PoS (for example, I hear they poll name enquiries on their site, and use the data to raise prices), so had vowed to avoid using them next time I need to register a name. Perhaps check on - https://www.namecheap.com/ - to confirm the name has gone, and if you create a new one, deal with them.

dynamiteReady

This might also be useful to read - https://www.domain.com/help/article/domain-registration-the-life-cycle-of-a-domain

Particularly:

While every registrar handles the redemption period differently, the redemption period commonly lasts for 30 days until the domain enters Pending Deletion status.

davyK

I have my registration and webspace with one provider and I get notifications from their customer portal. Bit late now of course but maybe going for an allin1 solution is better in the long run?

monkey

Yeah I know. The domain was inherited from the previous business owners so there was a whole mess in getting it all transferred anyway. She's not the best at the admin. Then poor old monkey gets roped in now and again when something technology-related has gone tits up and has to sift through the mess.

dynamiteReady

davyK wrote:

I have my registration and webspace with one provider and I get notifications from their customer portal. Bit late now of course but maybe going for an allin1 solution is better in the long run?

Depends... You can save a lot of money splitting out certain things.

If you're careful, and your requirements allow it, you can serve a '.com' for the price of the domain name (i.e. free) these days. That's a different convo though, tbh.

But don't listen to me. I'm paying way too much for stuff at the moment. I need to take my own advice...

monkey

Well, she's decided we're paying £60 to GoDaddy broker services to find out how much it's going to cost to buy it back. When the website wanted us to give a budget for purchase, she made me put $100.
Presumably they're just going to send an email off and in days / weeks / months, we might hear something back. If the asking price is $100 or less, I'll eat my hat. Meanwhile, the website is down. I'm sure this all makes sense in her head.

Can't remember what it was about but I looked into buying an occupied domain a few years ago, it wasn't being used for anything and I got a free quote from somewhere of thousands of pounds.

davyK

dynamiteReady wrote:

I have my registration and webspace with one provider and I get notifications from their customer portal. Bit late now of course but maybe going for an allin1 solution is better in the long run?

Depends... You can save a lot of money splitting out certain things. If you're careful, and your requirements allow it, you can serve a '.com' for the price of the domain name (i.e. free) these days. That's a different convo though, tbh. But don't listen to me. I'm paying way too much for stuff at the moment. I need to take my own advice...

You're right - shopping around and separating domain reg will be cheaper. It's the trade off re convenience I suppose. My website is only something I use for tinkering with PHP coding etc. Something I haven't gone back to in an age (in fact I think PHP is broken on it at the mo). I use it to host some images and 2600 ROMS I hack too.

I use Jumpline. My domain costs $50 a year (inc. SSL certificate - it was $35 before that became necessary). The webspace hosting is $7 a month. I get Perl & PHP code, a couple of opensource databases, cPanel for managing, email (inc. email marketing which I obvs have no need for) and a decent selection of applications that I've never looked at (content management, wikis, forums et al).

The support function/ticket raising is pretty good - I get fast responses and they seem to know what they are doing. I can spend more if I want my own VM etc, but for what I need which is just a sandpit to play in, it's more than good enough.

dynamiteReady

davyK wrote:

I have my registration and webspace with one provider and I get notifications from their customer portal. Bit late now of course but maybe going for an allin1 solution is better in the long run?

Depends... You can save a lot of money splitting out certain things. If you're careful, and your requirements allow it, you can serve a '.com' for the price of the domain name (i.e. free) these days. That's a different convo though, tbh. But don't listen to me. I'm paying way too much for stuff at the moment. I need to take my own advice...

You're right - shopping around and separating domain reg will be cheaper. It's the trade off re convenience I suppose. My website is only something I use for tinkering with PHP coding etc. Something I haven't gone back to in an age (in fact I think PHP is broken on it at the mo). I use it to host some images and 2600 ROMS I hack too. I use Jumpline. My domain costs $50 a year (inc. SSL certificate - it was $35 before that became necessary). The webspace hosting is $7 a month. I get Perl & PHP code, a couple of opensource databases, cPanel for managing, email (inc. email marketing which I obvs have no need for) and a decent selection of applications that I've never looked at (content management, wikis, forums et al). The support function/ticket raising is pretty good - I get fast responses and they seem to know what they are doing. I can spend more if I want my own VM etc, but for what I need which is just a sandpit to play in, it's more than good enough.

I've been using Digital Ocean for years, and that's good for general purpose stuff of a certain scale. I think they still do $5pm boxes (1GB Linux boxes).

Recently though, I've been using Cloudflare.

Their DNS management tools and free caching services are well known, but they now have this 'Workers' product, which is a kind of alternative to AWS Lambda. Again, $5 a month, but you can serve an infinite number of static sites as long as you don't max out the quota, which is generous (like, 500,000 requests). There's a bit of a learning curve associated with it (which is bad, because it's a tie in), but being able to do processing on a CDN node is pretty awesome ('edge computing' I think, is the yuppie term for it), though I've not really needed it. With it, you can do stuff like serve pages based on the user's location without a 'traditional' webserver, which is fun, if you're into that sort of thing. X'D

They have a free tier for this stuff too.

But Netlify is also an option, and their free tier is legendary. Was thinking of trying that next time.

@monkey - Good luck to your GF... Will be interesting to hear how that all works out, if you're willing to share. I think I'd just tap out, and change names, but that's not always an option.

Blue Swirl

How do you report an issue to Google Maps? I cycled to work this morning (rather than bike-train-bike, as there’s a train strike coming up), and it tried to send me down a private road through a car factory complex.

Nina

Think if you drop a pin at the location, you can pull up a tab which gives the option to suggest an edit at dropped pin. Add or fix road gives to option to mark it private.

That's on mobile at least.

GooberTheHat

Yeah, drop a pin, pull up the card and "suggest an edit on dropped pin", then you can "add or fix a road" and you can say a road doesn't exist, or is private.

Blue Swirl

Cheers much. Done and done.

Minnesänger

Blue Swirl wrote:

Cheers much.

What's the 3D streetview coverage like there, Swirl?

Hodge360

I usually keep it as local knowledge and let people blindly follow the map.

@davyK do you still host that poker solitaire game? Could you PM the link if so? Enjoyed that til I lost the tab.

davyK

Hodge360 wrote:

I usually keep it as local knowledge and let people blindly follow the map. @davyK do you still host that poker solitaire game? Could you PM the link if so? Enjoyed that til I lost the tab.

aye. I'm amazed it still works...the code is ancient.

http://www.davykelly.com/pokersolitaire

Blue Swirl

Minnesänger wrote:

Blue Swirl wrote:

Cheers much.

What's the 3D streetview coverage like there, Swirl?

Pretty universal, I reckon.

Minnesänger

Ah, nice. Any nice areas near you worth checking out using street view?

MattyJ

Hang on... Cinty is in China and wants a street view of Taiwan? Start panicking Swirl!

equinox_code

Can anyone think of a decent Final Fantasy VII pun or joke that could be used on the cover of a birthday card?

There is a decent explanation for this but it requires a bit of time to type up

Minnesänger

No need to type something super long, but anything you can tell us about the recipient?

equinox_code

It's for my girlfriend. She will turn 26-28, I need to check. She is a psychotherapist by profession. She comes from Luxembourg, and her birthday is in June

Hodge360

davyK wrote:

Hodge360 wrote:

I usually keep it as local knowledge and let people blindly follow the map. @davyK do you still host that poker solitaire game? Could you PM the link if so? Enjoyed that til I lost the tab.

aye. I'm amazed it still works...the code is ancient. http://www.davykelly.com/pokersolitaire

Thank you.

equinox_code

... Her name is Cheryl. She dislikes the theme to Gold Saucer (which the card will play on repeat, when she opens it up)

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