Thanks guys.
The only reason I wondered about some avenue to go down is because of ‘bad faith registration’ [?], something I vaguely remember reading about, and also the question of impersonating one of my wife’s established trading names. I though I could at least ask a specialist lawyer but that would cost me big money presumably, and get the same answer you just gave me.
The domain name is no use to the squatter and no one is going to pay £2k for it so he’s basically priced himself out of the market.
It’s my own stupidity, I know. I suspect I either misread incoming emails, or thought it was just on auto-renew and didn’t need to do anything, or thought that my wife was dealing with it; I don’t recall now.
The brain fog makes this exceptionally wearisome, keeping track if it all.
What should I do to reduce the risk? Renew for multiple years, so I don’t have to deal with it so often?
One thing that I have now done for the most important domain names which I cannot afford to screw up; I have employed Andrews and Arnold to do registration and auto renewal for me, which they will do and they just add it to my bill. So there’s no risk of screwing up individual credit card payments. Cards seem so unreliable these days, with random bogus and bonkers ‘security’-trigger failures. I went to Inverness some years ago and we went into a shop to buy a sofa, for about £1k. Straight away Janet got a load of cross from the credit card company; nightmare. The hassle of using credit cards is getting to the point where it’s more than they’re worth. I several times went into a shop and bought a car, which cost vastly more than a sofa, and no problem at all so the hassle factor seems to be totally random. Anyway coming back to the point, when it really matters that card transactions go through, the other thing that I’ve seen besides the AA solution, is to put your account into credit with the registrar Dynadot, ie. a top-up style payment; you have a positive balance in your account and then renewals just go through reliably with no payment taking required. The problem here is remembering to do the Dynadot top ups themselves when required, so the problem has just been transferred, plus the fact that you’re giving them the money ahead of time. AA seems the ideal zero hassle solution that is 100% reliable, but it’s not cheap, which is fair enough because they have to deal with the hassle for me.
