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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. Agreed. He fed a village (or more), saved the crop, and it looks like the people there find this to be a noble act.

Our U.S. grocery stores have stock piles of meat stacked in open refrigerators, butchered behind closed doors. Animals are fed and bred to be slaughtered so we can have a juicy burger and fries. Out of sight out of mind I guess.

Now... MAYBE the CEO of a hugely popular brand should not have participated in such an activity and filmed it for sake of his company, employees and customers, but I'm certainly not moving my domains over this.

There are probably employees there that don't like what he did either, but I'm not going to punish them for the actions of 1.

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> I'm certainly not moving my domains over this.

Me neither. I'm moving my domains because this reminded me of the silent, seething rage I have for Bob Parson's face.

When I go to a site that registers and manages domains, I don't want to see your face. I also don't want to see ads about how great your company is. When I buy a domain, I don't want to wade through five pages of bullshit you put up in the hopes that I won't notice some default or will misclick somewhere and inadvertently buy your useless services. I just want to register and manage my fucking domains.

Seriously, GoDaddy is the expertsexchange of domains.

Well, did u by any chance mean expert sex change??

well, that was supposed to be joke and u guys are downvoting!!!

Just out of curiosity where are you going to move your domains? I own just over 30 domains all at GoDaddy and I'd move them over the massive amounts of cross selling and insanely cluttered UI.

Namecheap offers a 4.99 USD transfer special using the "byebyeGD" coupon code, valid until 11:59pm EST 1st of April 2011: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/03/30/elephants/

... and just emailed me, as an existing Namecheap customer, letting me know that I can help save the elephants. Nice fast-move marketing. :)

"It's not often that we would disagree publicly with a competitor, but we at Namecheap are very disturbed by this video of a competitor killing an elephant for sport. Check out the ABC News Report (Warning: Very Graphic!)

We've decided to throw our support behind our Elephant friends by offering domain transfers at a price where we actually lose money.

Show your protest by saying BYEBYEGD again and transfer your domains to Namecheap for $4.99 for the next 24 hours through 11:59pm EST on 3/31/11 (limit 10 per user, valid for all com/net/org domains).

On top of that, we'll donate $1 for each transfer to Save The Elephants at http://www.savetheelephants.org/

Use coupon code BYEBYEGD and let's help the Elephants together!

Regards, Team Namecheap"

NameCheap are an ex-client (obvious disclaimer) back when they were a lot smaller than they are these days. They were a decent bunch and while always on the ball with marketing, I can imagine there being some genuine feeling behind this - they weren't the type to stick branded caps on African villagers, that's for sure.

I use dreamhost which sells domains at 10 bucks with automatic private registration. But dreamhost only sells .com, .net, and .us I believe. For the others I use name.com

Honestly I haven't done enough research, but I completely agree with the OP. I'd rather pay double than to have to sift through godaddys utter bullshit of a UI.

We're currently taking registrations under COM/NET (Verisign) and ORG/INFO (Afilias). US is a third, separate registry (NeuStar), and we aren't currently a registrar for them.

I'm slowly moving all my domains to Name.com. Once your account is setup and you've purchased one domain, all future domain purchases take a grand total of two clicks.

I like gandi quite a lot, it's simple and reliable.

I second that.

Copied from one of my previous comments in an old thread:

http://name.com

I've used godaddy, namecheap, and 1&1, but ended up switching all my domains to name.com. One of the best interfaces I've used as it doesn't try to abstract the DNS records from you. That was one of my biggest issues with 1&1 and godaddy - their interface made it so that I never knew exactly what my DNS settings were, just what the spoon-fed messages that I was given told me. The only "abstracted" thing that they do is provide a one-click solution for setting the dns entries for google apps (which you can still manually edit, as they appear in your DNS records). Here's some screenshots of the backend:

http://i.imgur.com/F5j5m.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rx3uq.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vGwwz.jpg

Seriously, try it. I liked them so much that I paid to have my other domains transfered to them. That alone should show you how much I enjoy it over the others I've tried.

I've been moving my domains (one by one as they expire) over to dynadot.com. So far I'm very happy--they have a much better interface and no annoying upsell junk during checkout.

I've heard they have a less powerful DNS interface but I run my own DNS servers so I've never noticed.

I've had good experiences with Hover.

> I'm certainly not moving my domains over this.

Godaddy's got plenty of other atrocities higher on my list, like the usability of their web panel.

While I agree that this certainly isn't the worst action of a CEO ever (nor this year or probably this day), I can understand the outrage a bit.

First of all, controlling your public image is a good idea, most of the time. Unless you want to go totally over the top and take it too a Donal Trump level. Hunting probably belongs in the same class as politics, religion and sexuality: Don't talk about it too much.

Second, it's hunting in Africa. Trying to look like you're the protector of a poor village there is going to bring back things like the "White Man's Burden" into the mind of people reading and watching this. Not a good idea, part deux.

Never mind that shooting elephants is a last-ditch effort. As far as I know there are lots of other ways to drive them off, maybe not as easy (and "entertaining") as just shooting them.

On the other hand, it's the GoDaddy CEO. Not exactly a brand with a good publicity anyway, and they barely need it. Enough people go there because they like to save money and/or don't know any competitors. Regarding needs for good publicity, they're probably somewhere between McDonalds and Monsanto.

And it's supporting the government of Zimbabwe, some of the worst on the continent.

I found it somewhat ironic that the villagers standing around cutting meat off the elephant seemed to do more damage by trampling the crops than the elephants did. Look at the last part of the video... between the elephants, hunters, and the entire village fighting over the meat, the poor farmers crops don't stand a chance.

Yes, it seems a large number of people are comparing our own countries way of life to the way of life in another country. We might go and admire elephants in zoos, but for some countries they're a PITA. Some people might think the way we (the "west") exterminate cock roaches and stuff is bs. Different cultures etc.

It's not the hunting that offends me. It's the GoDaddy hats during the slaughter.

The butcher at my grocery store wears a coat with the company name on it while he grounds up my hamburger.

That's cool, so does mine, and I have zero problem with that. However, GoDaddy is not it the elephant butchering business. Slapping their hats on people butchering an elephant strikes me as a crass marketing attempt (even for them).

That's a good point. But do you think they knew that this was going to happen when they handed out the hats?

And there are already too many elephants in South Africa: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7700606

That might well be true, but is it not Zimbabwe we're talking about here? I know they're neighbors, but that doesn't mean they face the same exact problems.

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