10:00 – As promised, UPS showed up after dinner yesterday with my replacement AmEx card. AmEx customer service called me Sunday to say there’d been suspicious activity on my card and that they’d denied several charges. The woman from AmEx had only the dates, amounts, and names on the questionable charges, none of which I’d made. She canceled my card and promised to have a new one to me by 7:00 p.m. yesterday, which is in fact when it arrived.
Meanwhile, I got a call yesterday from Cynmar, from whom I’d ordered a bunch of items last week. They shipped all of them but one, which was backordered. When they were filling the backorder yesterday, they attempted to charge my card and of course the transaction was refused. So their rep called me to ask what was going on. I explained, and she said they’d go ahead and ship the item, but to please call or email her as soon as I got my new card number. I did that first thing this morning, after I activated the new card.
The only place I use that card for recurring charges is GoDaddy, where I have two accounts, one for my domains and one for Barbara’s. So the next thing I did was update my credit card information at GoDaddy.com. While I was there, I looked at our domains. Barbara has four, her main researchsolutions.net domain, which she uses for her permanent email address, and fritchman.com/net/org. She uses fritchman.com for her diary page, but the others were simply redirected to the .com name. So I decided to change the .net and .org from auto-renew to manual, and just let them expire when they come up for renewal in February. I have six domain names, of which I’ve stopped using one and never used another. So I set those two domain names to manual renewal and I’ll let them expire when they come up for renewal in February.
You have been following the GoDaddy stories, right?
Yep. They backed down, and even if they hadn’t it’d be too much work to move all our domains.
Hmm. This was an issue I had somehow missed. From my reading, GoDaddy has not backed down. Nothing has changed, except they seem to be publicly stating that they are no longer taking a frontline position in supporting SOPA. Right,–no mention of a change of heart, but a big indication that they still support SOPA and are just deferring a visible role. In fact, their legislative guy said only that the issue ‘bears investigation’. And the legislation wording still excludes GoDaddy from any penalties under the act, if it passes. This is nothing but a ruse and a farce on GoDaddy’s part, IMO.
I am only responsible for one domain, and it is not up until summer, but this is going to force me to change–I think sooner than the expiration date. NameCheap will transfer for $7 and donate $1 to the EFF for every domain transferred.