About a week or so ago, I got this lovely gem in the info box for DoubleCluepon:

Hello, my name is Jonathan Waltz from Flex Media.
 emeraldkingdoms.com will be available for purchase in a few days.
 Since you own emeraldkingdom.com, I thought you might be interested in emeraldkingdoms.com.

 Our research on a sample size of over one million domains has led us to determine you are possibly losing up to 40%  of your traffic to emeraldkingdom.com by not owning emeraldkingdoms.com
 It is recommended to eliminate any confusion to emeraldkingdom.com, to own both the singular/plural versions of the domain.

 Your purchase will be a one time fee only that includes one year of complimentary registration.
 You also have the option to forward emeraldkingdoms.com to emeraldkingdom.com at no cost.
 After purchasing emeraldkingdoms.com you will never be charged again by Flex Media.

 If you do have an interest in buying emeraldkingdoms.com, please visit: [Link Removed]

 Once emeraldkingdoms.com is available for purchase, one of my account specialists will contact you.

 Thank you and have a great day.

One of the things that came up or rather, did not come up in my searches of the company was any relevant information in readable English. I was able to piece together one fact however:

Flex Media is a domain taster. What is a domain taster? From the Wikipedia Article: “Domain tasting is the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day “grace period” (the Add Grace Period or AGP) at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second-level domain to test the marketability of the domain. During this period, when a registration must be fully refunded by the domain name registry, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted by the registrant on the viability of deriving income from advertisements being placed on the domain’s website.”

In short, they use a loophole to hold on to a domain for 5 days, and then see if there is any interest in it. What Flex Media does, then is send an email to you with a a link. Like the one above. Now, here is the important bit: if you click the link in the email…forget about scoring your domain. It will get camped on. Here is what you do:

1) Hang onto the email. DO NOT click any of the links contained in the email. These links are for their site. If they register a hit, they will FULLY register the domain, and if you want it, you will be forced to pay a LOT for it.

2) If you have access to a BSD, Linux or UNIX shell, or know someone who does….do a command line whois. [whois -h whois.geektools.com domainname-you-want-to-look-for]. DO NOT trust web based whois searches. You have no way of knowing where the metrics for your web search are reported to.

3) An incomplete domain registration will appear as a 5 day hold. Different registries use different nomenclature. You may also get an incomplete response. This is normal.

4) DONT do any searches, don’t do ANYTHING that could register interest in the domain. Sit on your curiousity. After 7 days, go to your favorite place to buy domain names, and register the domain. It should be available. We use DynDNS. DynDNS is one of the best Domain houses on the net. They are, at the very least, not at all sleazy.

I just purchased emeraldkingdoms.com and emeraldkingdoms.net for $15.00 a piece. As opposed to hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars.

Domain Taster: 0

Double Cluepon Software: 2

I realize this is not strictly game oriented. But we are also a business, and we are in this to make money. I’ve written this post, in the hopes that once Google picks it up, it should help others avoid these kinds of tactics. Hopefully it also helps other game developers too. =)