Squatter Domains, Tracked with Delicious

A few weeks ago I hit a couple of domain squatter sites in quick succession and got a bit annoyed. I asked on twitter/identi.ca whether anyone knew of any kind of domain squatter database on the web, perhaps along the lines of the email RBL lists, but got no replies.

I thought at the time that delicious might be useful for this, in much the same way that Jon Udell has been exploring using delicious for collaborative event curation.

So here's the results of some hacking time this weekend: Squatter Redirect, a greasemonkey script (i.e. firefox only, sorry) that checks whether the sites you visit have been tagged on delicious as squatter domains that should be directed elsewhere, and if so, does the redirect in your browser.

Here's a few squatter domains to try it out on:

The script checks two delicious accounts - your personal account, so you can add your own domains without having to wait for them to be pulled into the 'official' squatter_redirect stream; and the official squatter_redirect delicious account, into which other people's tags are periodically pulled after checking.

Marking a new domain as a squatter simply involves creating a delicious bookmark for the squatter page with a few special tags:

  • squatter_redirect - flagging the bookmark for the attention of the squatter_redirect delicious user
  • squatter_redirect=www.realdomain.com - setting the real domain that you want to be redirected to
  • (optional) squatter_domain=www.baddomain.com - marker for the squatter domain itself (only required if you want to use from your own delicious account)

So www.quagga.org above would be tagged:

squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net
# or, optionally:
squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net squatter_domain=www.quagga.org

Feedback/comments welcome.