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The .feedback scam

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Re: The .feedback scam

#51

Post by JokerDan »

Stratoscope wrote: post #15
wodenokoto wrote: post #2

Wow, the author is not exaggerating when saying it is a scam. Looking at the .feedback page for Stack Overflow, it says at the top, in fairly large letters "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers, share knowledge & find jobs they love. Also proud builders of the @stackexchange Q&A network." Then at the absolute bottom, in small, washed out print it says "Disclaimer: This site is provided to…

Well, the reviews on stackoverflow.feedback are quite informative! Dan Manny says: Stack over flow made me loose money!!! Bad code with security wholes in it crashed my clients site!! Warning warning for scammers and Antonio B. of Indonesia says: Best site for solving programming issue!!!11!one! The most user and newbie friendly site! 11/10 would recommend You know you can trust reviews like this!

Having a quick look through I think most of the responses are just trolls.

Re: The .feedback scam

#52

Post by a5seo »

wodenokoto wrote: post #2

Wow, the author is not exaggerating when saying it is a scam. Looking at the .feedback page for Stack Overflow, it says at the top, in fairly large letters "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers, share knowledge & find jobs they love. Also proud builders of the @stackexchange Q&A network." Then at the absolute bottom, in small, washed out print it says "Disclaimer: This site is provided to…

Pretty much RipoffReport 2.0, except scaled to hyperbolic levels! Yay!!!!

Re: The .feedback scam

#53

Post by klodolph »

SolarNet wrote: post #46
blazespin wrote: post #36

You can't do "or pay $600/year to take the web site down". There are laws against that. It's called extortionate. That being said, they could be more subtle like Glassdoor / Yelp / etc. People would actually have to find .feedback domains useful for that to happen however. My sense is that this will just go nowhere, no business will be made, and it's all a lot of sound and fury over nothing.

Well they word it differently I'm sure.

Wording things differently rarely has any significant legal impact.

(Except in advertising, right?)

Re: The .feedback scam

#54

Post by xg15 »

Comment from the article:

> I would like to add that IMHO all new TLDs are scam. Brand owners are forced to register their name in many of them.

.feedback is just the tip of the iceberg.

I think this is the core issue here. I remember that a few of ICANN's new TLDs caused similar issues. The idea of selling TLDs to companies for use at their discretion is horrible enough, but they also seem to be completely ignorant of this problem.

This feels as if ICANN is trying to become the new FIFA.

(I don't really have much empathy for google etc having to pay $600 a year, but the same problem could also hit lots of small sites. Also with the current trend, TLDs seem to loose all structure and meaning and just turn into another brand vehicle or trade asset)

Re: The .feedback scam

#55

Post by cyberferret »

dasil003 wrote: post #13

Reminds me of GetSatisfaction back in the day. It was never as much of an outright scam as this, but they definitely had that protection racket vibe about it.

I do remember the pitchforks and burning effigies around the GetSatisfaction drama a while back.

For those that don't know, GetSatisfaction is/was a 'user support' site designed for users of a particular app/service to provide support to each other - only the fact that it wasn't an official support page was not immediately obvious. They had a line somewhere on the page that said something like "We hope that a support rep from the company will chime in on these threads" but not much else.

People ended up getting extremely frustrated with the companies in question, believing that the company was ignoring them when questions went unanswered.

To their credit, I think they changed things and made the situation clearer when several companies lambasted them on social media, but I don't know that they ever fully recovered and became as popular as they were before that.

Re: The .feedback scam

#56

Post by ship_it »

blazespin wrote: post #36

You can't do "or pay $600/year to take the web site down". There are laws against that. It's called extortionate. That being said, they could be more subtle like Glassdoor / Yelp / etc. People would actually have to find .feedback domains useful for that to happen however. My sense is that this will just go nowhere, no business will be made, and it's all a lot of sound and fury over nothing.

> You can't do "or pay $600/year to take the web site down".

Okay, IANAL, but that probably is not true.

Well, at least not in that way. They could for example, sell the .feedback domain to company owners, in regards that owner can either enable or disable user-given feedback.

Else, they could run the .feedback domain that point for a specific company, and nothing stops them, reason is pretty clear - it's their TLD, and if they got approved by ICANN, then nothing stops them in illegal way (copyright infringement are as powerful as ICANN is).

Re: The .feedback scam

#57

Post by finnn »

The whois data for domains under this TLD is kind of interesting

whois stackoverflow.feedback returns a phone number with a CNAM of STACK OVERFLOW, and the same address listed on https://stackoverflow.com/company/contact

whois google.feedback returns the phone number +1.1978600872, which is not a valid US area code last I checked. The address appears to be a PO box in Seattle.

facebook.feedback has the same bogus phone number and the same PO box as google.feedback.

myaccount.feedback (where they send you if you try to vote on anything, presumably other things too) has a residential address on Mercer Island, WA and a Google Voice number listed.

Calling the Google Voice number results in a voicemail where a person identifies themselves as "Jay" (presumably Jay Westerdal[0] of Top Level Spectrum, Inc who owns the .feedback TLD[1])

Another thing of interest is that myaccount.feedback encourages you to login with Google/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn

[0]: https://icannwiki.org/Jay_Westerdal [1]: https://icannwiki.org/Top_Level_Spectrum,_Inc.

Re: The .feedback scam

#58

Post by lloeki »

CPLX wrote: post #34
Stratoscope wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the reviews on stackoverflow.feedback are quite informative! Dan Manny says: Stack over flow made me loose money!!! Bad code with security wholes in it crashed my clients site!! Warning warning for scammers and Antonio B. of Indonesia says: Best site for solving programming issue!!!11!one! The most user and newbie friendly site! 11/10 would recommend You know you can trust reviews like this!

> !!!11!one! Is there a word for the feeling you get when you see 15+ year old idiot message board / forum / usenet catchphrases apparently still going strong? It's a curious mix of nostalgia and revulsion.

I do use such constructs from time to time as a mix of nostalgia and tongue in cheek.

Re: The .feedback scam

#59

Post by thecloud »

klodolph wrote: post #49
CPLX wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> !!!11!one! Is there a word for the feeling you get when you see 15+ year old idiot message board / forum / usenet catchphrases apparently still going strong? It's a curious mix of nostalgia and revulsion.

The German word for it is Beinaheleidenschaftsgegenstand, apparently.

In 22 years of living in germany, ive never once heard anyone use that atrocity of a word or anything close to it - I guess it's a joke-word from the tv series How I met your mother making fun of the fact that many complex german words are just glued together from other words, eg. Krankenhaus ("ill building" or "building for the ill"). This does not mean that every compound word you theoretically could form is actually a valid german word.

Re: The .feedback scam

#60

Post by Gaelan »

ams6110 wrote: post #26
rrauenza wrote: post #17

Could the major browser providers start just blacklisting these kinds of TLD's? Or grey listing with huge warnings?

Google provides a huge DNS service. Could they just return NXDOMAIN for the entire .feedback TLD?

Yes, but I feel that it would cause a very large mob in Mountain View.
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