From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/
About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.
I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.
Prices went up, service went down. I’d recommend moving your domains when you can (Porkbun have been good, though I haven’t had any incidents like this).
Best of luck!
I've used their services for ages and even got to briefly meet the founders once in Wellington who gave a talk on Erlang.
Ah well, while it sucks that the good times may be over, I'm glad the founders got their exit :)
I'm not.
I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing a business to an exit is not going well for society as a whole (at least the exits that are in my areas of interest, so I assume it extrapolates to all exits).
Every single business that gets bought out gets instantly enshittified in one way or another, always to the detriment of the customer. Depending on how entrenched it was it takes a different amount of time for people to move on as the new shareholders extract its economical value, but it almost always destroys societal value in the process as the company becomes a shadow of its former self (and hopefully dies, leaving way for the cycle to start again).
I wish there was a way for founders to get rich without the need for an exit, so the business could keep running... but I guess ruthless enshittification is the only way to get rich?
Apologies for the tangent, this is something that's been bouncing in my mind for a while...
Oh yeah, I fully agree with the enshittification sentiment.
Admittedly, a DNS registrar for me personally is something I'd just swap without much thought but I can think of a few services I use where I wouldn't be so loosely coupled from the product if those founders were to exit.
It's a bit paradoxical on my part I think and I do wish we had more lifestyle businesses that don't have to become massive.
Mind you, I would have put iwantmyname in that basket now that I think about it.