Squarespace Domains is abysmal

Right now, I am trying to make a very simple change to my domain -- I am trying to switch it over from my Squarespace website over to a Google Sites page.

Over on Google Domains, this would take less than ten minutes to complete, and it would work perfectly. Google seems to always have this going for themselves; when they make software, they make really good software. But, of course, Google also seems to love killing products left and right. Even now, as we speak, they are shutting down their digital whiteboard service called Jamboard. They killed the physical Jamboards yesterday, they killed Chromecast two months ago, and they killed their VPN service just a month before that.

And this is how I ended up on Squarespace Domains. Google decided to kill Google Domains a year ago, and sold all domains over to Squarespace. And this... is just not a good service.

You see, the reason I'm switching away from Squarespace is actually just as a temporary measure. Right now I can't afford Squarespace for my website, so I'm going to Google Sites as the alternative. And so far, it's been a nightmare.

If you visit www.screenbones.com right now, you get the expected webpage. Wonderful! But if you try just screenbones.com, you find yourself on Squarespace's "Expired Website" page.

The worst part is, this isn't even how I configured the domain. When I go to my domain forwarding page, screenbones.com is configured to redirect to www.screenbones.com. It's quite literally disobeying the configuration settings I put there. In fact, it refuses to enable Path Forwarding. It's listed as an option, but when I actually select it, this simply does not change.

But it goes even deeper than that. I have several subdomains set up for redirecting. Here's a full list of them:

• azanarchy: Redirects to what used to be Lucifer's YouTube Channel. Apparently the URL does not exist anymore, so I would have had to delete this anyways.
• marriagerespect: Created for Congressional Heroes, this is supposed to redirect to an outline I put together describing what the Respect for Marriage Act does, although Google did as Google does and they changed how this works, breaking my link. The document is still published, just under a different URL, so I would have had to update or delete this.
• bessie: This redirects to a fundraiser page I created in honor of my dog, Bessie, who passed away in 2020.
• mal: This redirects to my MyAnimeList page. This hasn't been updated in forever, and I honestly forgot it's even there.
• bidenrulesletter: This was created back when I still used Twitter, and was simply to provide a text version of a letter published by President Joe Biden, as apparently the White House doesn't seem to understand that blind people exist and might like to read it. This redirect has the same problem at the moment as marriagerespect. Probably gonna delete this, too.

While none of these redirects are critical -- more than likely I'd have only kept the bessie one anyways -- the problem is that right now, all of them redirect back to the "Expired Website" page. And I just can't comprehend how on Earth this could have gone so wrong. I changed two settings, and it was to assign www to my Google Site, and redirect the root domain to it. That's it. That's everything I did. And now everything is just broken.

And the weirded part of this? It's only the redirects that broke. Here are the following subdomains that I have configured:

• critters: This goes to a Github Pages site that doesn't exactly exist anymore. This rule will be gone by the time you read this, so don't even try claiming it.
• stories: This goes to my Medium site. Works perfect.
• supersecret: This was where the Squarespace page was originally located, and it's still present there. This is the only place where my expired website should be accessible.

I might just step away and try figuring this out tomorrow. Or just hope it fixes itself. If not, I might just switch over to Godaddy, I do not need this frustration in my life.