Stylized line drawing of mark playing the flute

The strangest domain name

How many of you can say you’ve owned a domain like impenetrabledogsassheuristic'com?

I have, although I never did anything with it and it expired a couple of years ago.

I was working as a web developer for a local ad agency. We were working on a promotion for a large company in honor of Movember. They wanted a special website where people could upload pictures of themselves and slap a mustache on it.

It was going to be amazing. There were going to be all different styles of mustaches and each upload would have a unique url that could be shared on Twitter or Facebook. Exposure for the company and exposure for Movember!

At some point though, we realized there were going to have to be controls to prevent people from uploading anything unsavory.

β€œWhat if someone uploads a picture of a dog’s asshole and puts a mustache on it?”

β€œWe need some kind of dog’s ass heuristic!”

And thus, the strangest domain name ever was born.

We experimented with lots of different filtering ideas. The first thought was a moderator who had to approve each upload but that was scrapped over scaling concerns.

In the end, we went with a Facebook connection. You had to login using Facebook to access the site and it would only let you choose from pictures you’d already uploaded to Facebook.

They’re pretty strict on what sorts of pictures they allow so it seemed easier to let them handle filtering out the dog assholes.

The project ended up getting scrapped, I don’t know why.

But impenetrabledogsassheuristic'com is still one of my favorite domains. I just wish I’d come up with something good to do with it.