OK guys. You have my hands tied. There is certainly no wriggling out of this one... (bah)
I will give you a timeline:
26 December 2004: Tsunami strikes, the worst natural disaster in recorded history. Hundreds of thousands of people die.
Later on 26 December 2004: The first tsunami domains get listed on Sedo. Most of these are of the ilk:
TsunamiCarnage.com, TsunamiMutilation.com, TsunamiFun.com, TsunamiDeath.com, TsunamiBodies.com
A lot of sick stuff.
January 2005: Sedo receives email after email complaining about the listings. Sedo decides to ban all tsunami domains and deletes them from the system.
Fast forward to April 2005: Ed receives an email saying "I see you have Tsunami domains on the system, I was told I wasn't allowed to have them." Ed sees there are more sick tsunami domains on Sedo and believes the email is a demand to remove them all again. Sedo does this as the final death toll of the tsunami had only recently been announced.
April 2005: Forum outrage. People take great pleasure in finding other 'contraversial' listings on Sedo. Ed despairs.
Later April 2005: Ed receives another email from the original email sender in April 2005 saying "Oh, I only mentioned it because I was thinking of listing my tsunami domain once more and wasn't sure if it was allowed". Ed despairs again as he could have simply listed it without anyone knowing and saved Ed's blushes.
June 2005: This post. Ed despairs.
Right then. There are clear things that must be learned here. Firstly, from a personal point of view, I find most tsunami domains very offensive, just as I do various other offensive domains on Sedo. However, from a company point of view, it is clear we have to develop a clearer stand on what is offensive and what isn't.
People say up to 75% of internet traffic is adult traffic. Many people find it offensive. Does Sedo remove all adult content?
We already try to remove all illegal content, such as drugs, child porn etc. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of .com registrations alone are made weekly, we have a database of 1.8 million domains and we are the number one sales platform for domains, so the number of listed domains increases every day. Filtering out every offensive domain and criminal domain is hard enough, especially when trademarked domains are also taken into account. If we blacklist Coccaine, someone posts cocca1ne, if we blacklist tsunami, someone lists tsun4mi, you get the picture. Stringently controlling every domain that is entered into our system is not an easy thing to do, especially when it's so difficult to know where to draw the offensive "line".
We do ensure that our homepage is free at all times from offensive domains - so none in the top domains or featured listings (the tsunami domain there is vulunteertsunami.com - not too offensive).
As I said at the beginning of this post, my hands are tied. If you want to list your tsunami domains and you have a clear conscience about them, then I won't stop you. I hardly believe the email was 'tear-jerking' though. It simply stated that the 'wounds are still fresh'. A massive number of people in the world have lost loved ones or knew people who died in the disaster and, even though the event was 5 months ago, I don't think those people are feeling much better about what happened.
Thank you for your time....
Ed
