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Comment by thangngoc89 | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to the article but seeing .tk brings back many memories. As a kid without a bank account let's alone an international credit card (VISA/Mastercard), dot.tk is the only way to put a website online with your name. I created countless of websites with .tk for classmates, school and families.

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Same here. .tk was the only one back then that allowed you to have your own domain name without subdomains. My memory is that:

1. freeserver.com/~userna <- This was the first URl you could have, sometimes with something inside another directory (freeserver.com/users/u/~usernam).

2. username.freeserver.com <- This wasn't that bad but it didn't look professional. Tripod used to do this.

3. username.fs.com <-- A service with a short domain that provided free subdomains. This was similar to 2 but shorter. Some of them allowed you to chose the domian part.

4. username.tk <-- Among all the free options, this was the best one by far.

Then we grew up a bit and started paying domains :')

Im trying to remember I think it was 8m.com or something like that? Which also let you have stuff like username.8m.com its probably gone now.

I also miss tripod, not sure if its still around how it used to be. Angelfire comes to mind too.

Oh ya. I had my first website on 8m.com still available in the archives!! Best days!

Those sites are still up, the control panel is at freeservers.com my Site davinder.8m.net is still up after 22 years. I chose .net because it was cooler than .com :)

Hah! Thats awesome, I don’t recall any of the names I used to be honest, its been too many years.

I remember 20m in the UK, which did basic hosting.

Good times.

The problem with .tk was that it would inject ads into your content. And the whole TLD was filled with low quality spam and hacks. I never liked it.

$7/yr for a domain was one of the very first internet purchases I made. Then that set me down a path of finding free dynamic DNS services. For a short time my website and Invision forum were only online when I was, but I felt like I'd beaten the advertisers.

I remember there was scripts that remove the ads .tk injected

I don't remember this. I started using TK domains as a kid in 2017 and you set your own nameserver records and they didn't serve ads.

When I used .tk briefly in 98-99 it was using iframes and they injected ads and/or opened pop-ups IIRC.

Not even iframes, by my memory it was regular frames (rip).

One frame at the top with a banner ad and then your site below it.

Yes, you're probably right. It was quite blunt :)

This was in the 90's and 00's.

.tk was the only top level domain you could get without having to give them payment details or personal information.

It was a huge deal at the time for kids, students, and spammers.

They made their money by injecting scripts onto your pages to display banner ads.

>kid >2017

fucking hell

I know right! I feel so young.

there are people on this site that were born in the previous millennium! :O

How do you do, fellow kids?

(reference: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mO8UICqmeSd97l09w_FgSP1TDPQ=...)

oof. We didn't even have the Internet, nevermind Google. Kids these days will never even know what it was like pre ChatGPT. programming and even just computers alone was hard back in the day.

Hard?! You'd generally have one or two medium size books that documented the whole environment including corner cases, very few or no third party libraries, no frameworks, no autoupdates, just programmers living their best lives. If anything ChatGPT is filling the hole created by poorly documented "open source" churn.

from my perspective, I can just ask ChatGPT to give me code to whatever and it gives it to me. way easier than figuring it out for myself. hell, with openinterpreter, I can just tell my computer to fix my python shit for me. sure, there weren't me frameworks every week, so knowing C++ and MFC was a sure thing, but it's so much easier today. python points at the character of the exact line of code that's throwing the error. no more spending hours of your life to find a missing semicolon, unless you try using rust (seriously, the difference between OK() and OK(); is material? I mean I understand it now after the fact but ungh).

you can't grep paper books, at best you can look things up in the index. even without ChatGPT I can ask Google and get stack overflow and just copy and paste without having to think deeply within minutes. if I'm just trying to get something out there, why do it the hard way? there's still need for the hard way (eg, I'm currently fighting Ida pro for a thing), but there's just less of a call for that.

People born after 1990 aren't real.

I remember one around the year 2000 that gave you yourname.com for free but it would host your site in a frameset with a bottom frame serving banner ads. IIRC it was called NameZero, but I don't think it lasted long.

That was definitely NameZero. Their problem was they had no way to control what you ran inside your frame, so everyone ran a well-distributed code snippet that removed the ad frame.

Similar to Angelfire, which only inserted ads into the top of .html files, so you just built your entire site as .txt files and rely on the browsers "be lenient in what you accept" to render it as HTML.

de.vu was popular in Germany for subdomains, I had a few of those. Also a .tk one later.

Yeah, also .de.tf. I just looked it up and my old site is on the wayback machine. So many memories.

In France .fr.st was a popular free option

Yup, and .fr.fm too

de.vu always rubbed me the wrong way because it kinda looked/sounded like DVU, a far-right political party that eventually merged with the neo-nazi NPD (which, fun fact, recently rebranded itself as Die Heimat - Homeland). To be fair, the party didn't have much political relevance for most of its history but it did manage to win seats in some state (Land) parliaments in 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004 and 2007 so it did come up in the news around the time those domains were most popular.

On the other hand, .tk was in my mind mostly associated with German hobbyists and piracy. I think my old StarCraft/CounterStrike clan had a .tk domain at one point.

Never got the DVU connection, my AoE1/2 clan had .de.vu before we got a .de, I also know several other people in my class who had one.

On the other hand .tk is more something I remember in connection with spam and scam :D

I recall using *.8k.com because that was one of the shortest free *.com options around.

My site davinder.8m.net is still up after 22 years. Only 2 years ago I managed to find its password.

I remember putting up Minecraft servers under .uk.to, also co.cc

Friend of mine had a .tk domain for a while, last one he used was a .aa.am domain for his Minecraft server, lol.

In italy we had 3000.it

https://web.archive.org/web/20010331143129/http://www.kliman...

SPOILER: I didn’t become a webdesigner

But did you become a webmaster?

Yep webhighmaster :D im a software developer now

LOL!

On a good day sure, most days I would settle on me being a house elf, or dozer...

Dobby! :D

Heh. I remember thinking '©' and '®' being cool letters. I put it on every page since it looked pro. I guess you didn't actually register the "brand"?

Naaah i changed dozens of nicknames since then :D

I believe you don't have to do anything to claim copyright, other than make it yourself. One vague legal source I just read says that adding the copyright symbol and notice means you may be entitled to more damages if someone infringes on your copyright though.

I remember in the early 90s telling Mom that I built my own website. Mom was like noway that's impossible. I can't remember exactly where it was but it was like zoogatyler1.go.com or something. I think it was owned by Disney? I must have been around 7 or 8 but I remember being so excited. I think it was more of a homepage than anything. I started delving into those .tk sites when I was around 11 or 12 probably.

I launched one on a compuserve domain (I think) around the same time. Built it with FrontPage Express that came for free on a cd with a magazine my dad bought. Day after I launched it I had like 20 emails from random people with questions & comments about the site, crazy. Build it and they will come was def a thing.

Later on in the UK I put a site on a madasafish domain.

same - I remember hosting a small web server from a crappy pc at my parents house and using a .tk to serve the site.

Probably not the smartest thing to do at the time since I may have opened up all ports on the router to get it to work, lol. No https. No security. No moderation. Copy and pasted some html from a site that I thought was cool, search and replaced text to make it my own.

It was kind of like a microblog before twitter, fb, ig, blogspot, tumblr.

I used .co.nr alongside .tk for a while, before moving to .co.cc, and then finally managing a way to buy my domain.

I think I had co.nr too! I just dont remember if it was like .tk or if it was one of those webhosts.

I definitely had a .co.nr domain before a .tk. I think I also remember (I was likely 13, so its been a while) that they had an "English" test question on the sign up form that read something like "A Britney Spears is a:" and one of the options was "Hamburger".

Looking back this could have been to slow robots down, but I distinctly remember one if the terms being you speak and host English content.

Another service I used a lot was " dominosfree" which had a bunch of .gs domains that looked like CC-tlds. I used .ca.gs a lot.

Ah, co.cc, the tld that was full of php reverse shells!

.co.nr was strange because it put your page inside of an iframe and required advertisement of the service.

Yeah, the cloaking was annoying - navigation across pages wouldn’t update the URL.

Oh man, this brings back memories from high school!

.tk was a blessing for us.

Same here! I remember registering a .tk domain for a school project I was working on at the time, my friends were all so impressed when I showed them it was available as a website they could visit in their browser

I remember switching to cjb.net because you could get free wildcard email accounts for your domain.

Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time. I had a Dragon Ball Z website using that domain, feels so long ago.

It's interesting seeing it parallels the problems with .tks today-- I remember using cjb.net to make my own LOVE@AOL websites and phish AOL users telling them that a crush liked their account. Easiest money a 12 year old ever made.

I used to host my websites wherever and then having a redirect to it. Two I remember was pagina.de/dr.enima (roughly translates to site of dr.enigma, my nickname back then) and i.am/supermatrix - a website dedicated to the movie the matrix which I love.

I think both of those pages were hosted in geocities and had pretty long urls...

If i recall correctly, i use frames with size 0 on the top and 100% on the bottom, making that annoying banner invisible

In South Africa you could get a za.net domain for free. They stopped new registrations quite some time back as the spam era of the internet was getting started. I still have my domain and use it for all sorts of different things. From email to experiments.

Name server changes are still done through email.

I remember flexing on my friends that the google site I had got a proper name with .tk!

God. I’d forgotten all about .tk until reading this comment. What an amazing time.

What are kids using these days?

Serious question, Heroku and .tk were such amazing services if you weren't old enough to get a credit card.

My favorite was .uni.cc, I had a couple of those free domains back in the day.

i share a similar story but today we don't seem to have any alternatives. it is a shame really but i wonder if there is something else that does not involve freenom today.

Did you also use 000webhost.com with .tk domains like me?

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