The name was musicbox.fun. I got it for a side-project, an interactive online music box that I had built and hosted at musicboxfun.com. The new name was shorter and more quirky. I felt lucky to have grabbed it.
From June 2018 to February 2021, the site racked up thousands of copyright violation complaints. Over 20,000 of its urls were delisted by Google (and other search engines) before the site went offline in 2022.
I had no idea, of course. It wasn’t until I had redirected all of my musicboxfun.com traffic to musicbox.fun that I noticed that something wasn’t right: my web traffic from organic search dropped to zero.
I assumed it was temporary so I double-checked my process and waited for awhile, but it never really recovered. It wasn’t until a year later that I discovered the copyright violations and learned that the domain name was compromised.
Apparently, this is a thing that happens to domain names, but as far as I know, there’s not really a name for it. When I described it to my wife, she said “Oh, so it’s haunted.”