Domain Name Hack Club

It's been almost three months since the launch. The club has seen more members joining, and we've added a secondary tier of candidates that have all been identified after running a massive scan effort.

The scanning process essentially ran through a huge list of common names and identified which name fits a domain name hack against a list of TLDs. From there some of the process was automated to search for active responses on the domain, and searching for some key indicators of personal homepages - such as links to Github or LinkedIn profiles.

The final part of the process was manual and required verification that candidate websites really belong to real people.

The open question now is where should the club proceed, now that it's established and mildly successful. Is there any next milestone we should hit?

Domain Name Hack club has been live for almost a month, and we already have more than a dozen members that have joined through very basic marketing efforts!

Those efforts consisted of cold e-mails and Github pull requests. The initial automation efforts involved manual research, and then a simple script that opened a PR for every candidate tagging then on Github and inviting them to approve their membership.

Next step is finalizing a much more massive script that goes through tens of thousands of potential names, scans for active domains, scores according to web page content and filters out any parked domains or non-personal homepages.

Getting to those members is still TBD, but regardless the club is growing.