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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

.tk was all the rage when I was younger, early 2000s something. You got a top level domain for free! Of course, they would just serve your webpage through a frameset with ads surrounding it unless you paid. But it rocked being able to say "visit my webpage matsemann.tk" instead of home.no.net/users/~matsemann/ (~ on Norwegian keyboard needs an alt+gr combo plus pressing space to show, and back in the days having to explain the direction of slashes also made it hard)

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Except for https://tcl.tk/ of course!

Your direct link reminds me that many years ago, .tk was shadowbanned on reddit; you could see your post containing a .tk link, but no one else would. It might still be that way.

I understand the (arguable) necessity and the prolific scams, but it seemed cruel to broke teenagers.

OMG this really brings back some memories. I totally forgot about that .tk iframe thing. Wasn't it in the late 90s?

Was still a thing in the late 2000s, at least in my (european) internet bubble at the time.

This was also one of the only ways for a broke middle schooler without a credit card to get a cool "real" domain.

Combine it with dyndns, self-host some ancient-but-free bulletin-board software (Woltlab Burning Board may ring a bell for the European / German audience) after learning about this "Apache2" and "mod_php" thing and your small slice of internet with 10 users max is done. Good times. :D

Always used phpbb but when I discovered a nulled version of WBB in my script kddie days, heck was it a good time.

Yes, but since it has been operated by freenom, along with .ml, .ga, .gk, and .cf it's a real disaster.

There is an audio interview, linked on HN, in one of the comments I can’t find, about the crazy story of tk domains involving gun running and drug smuggling, freedom getting sued by Facebook for tk abuse and so on. It was very interesting to hear dotcom bust millionaire stories from a user here.

Have this instead “How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Hub of Cybercrime”

https://m.slashdot.org/story/421307

> through a frameset with ads surrounding it unless you paid

Or used JavaScript tricks to hide the ads, or redirect the outer page to an ad-free URL. I know you could do the former on cjb.net, but perhaps .tk required the latter.

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