An indelicate problem ... and a warning? ;)

dalecosp

I help churches with websites, and have commercial sites as well. Recently, 'foochurch.com' (yeah, not its real name, heh) expired --- and we weren't notified 'til email started bouncing, because the WHOIS database had somebody else's long forgotten contact info in it.

Verisign was impossible to deal with on this issue, so we let it drop and moved this church to 'foochurch.org' (which we think is better anyway, churches aren't supposed to be "coms" IMHO).

3 months later, some seedy character has registered the old "foochurch.com" (probably en masse with a bunch of other abandoned doms) and pointed it at a site where, well, the girls aren't wearing their Sunday best. :o A few older folks in the church, who apparently don't bother to update their bookmarks (no, um, "favorites" ... doubt there's many Gecko-types there) pulled this up the other day, and the church's phone's have been taking several calls a day about this since then ... the client I think tires of it, and is confused and feeling attacked (and probably like it's my fault....)

Anybody had an experience like this one? What the heck do you call it, anyway? Near as I can figure, while someone's doing this was unethical and immoral, it's wasn't illegal ... the church abandoned that domain name. Is there any recourse for them? I doubt any legal action could be brought, and if so, it'd be too expensive; to attempt to undo the damage by some other, um, technical means (heh) would be almost as unethical as the offense done to them ...

As near as I can tell, my only fault here is not being psychic. I couldn't have imagined that this would happen --- (AAMOF, when they first called me I thought they were complaining that the photo gallery on the church site had missing pix!!)

Y'know, this whole thing is so stupid that I'd laugh if I wasn't thinking I may lose a good customer.... 🙁

Well, anyway, if you're thinking of abandoning a domain ... buy an extra year and put a "we've moved" page there.... :rolleyes:

stolzyboy

This happened to me with a client, they are a rotary site, the site is www.blahblahrotaryclubs.org, well they couldn't understand why you had to put blahblahrotaryclubs.org instead of blahblahrotary.org, and that went to some MILF Hunter type site, holy crap did they freak out, they said what can i do, i said nothing, all you can do is tell your members what the real domain was

dalecosp

Interesting.

I've thought about hacking a hosts file (and probably will, at least for the office machines) that just says

foochurch.com        ipof.foo.church.org

Is this a common occurrence? And, was the name abandoned and then taken over by the bad guyz, or did they just grab a "soundalike" hoping to make some $$?

I mean, I can see the business angle of this. If they register 1K of abandoned domain names in bulk at like, five bucks each, they probably only need 250 people out of the entire userbase of all those old domains to join up to recoup their investment...

stolzyboy

there were just buying lookalikes, i'm sure, but either way, there really isn't a way to stop it, unless you buy all the lookalikes as well, but most clients don't wanna spend the money, especially .org's, but then they wonder how it happened, and you say, well duh, i told you

Elizabeth

Sorry to hear of your predicament dalecosp- the best advice I can muster is that the church needs to inform its own members of the change in URL - that perhaps communication is their best bet. They could probably add a sentence in the next newsletter about the change, or potentially send out a batch of postcards to all their members about it, if they want to make sure people read it. They might want to have an announcement made at church as well, if they're into that.

You might explain to them that it's just like if their phone number had changed and the person who got the new number ran a house of ill-repute. Not much you can do about that except communicating with those that need the info.

Just my $.02

-Elizabeth

LordShryku

Same thing happened to big Bill not too long ago. They forgot to re-register hotmail.uk. Some guy bought it up, and probably made a killing selling it back...

piersk

Yeah, that was about a month ago. Story is in 2 parts:

Part 1

Part 2

ahundiak

Who came up with the idea that churches should be org and not com? The churches in my neck of the woods make a tremendous amount of money.

stolzyboy

yes they do but NOT for profit

Weedpacket

Eee, reminds me of this incident. (Incidentally, it's www.phpguru.org, now.)

Merve

dale, your story isn't that uncommon. Domain name scandals are very common. There is or was a porn site that had a very similar URL to Google's but that's common knowledge and I'm sure you're fully aware of that.

LordShryku

Sorry to dig up the old thread guys, but this is right along these lines, and I thought you guys would like this 🙂
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/02/27/1859254.shtml

Weedpacket

A .god TLD?

tekky

Originally posted by Merve
dale, your story isn't that uncommon. Domain name scandals are very common. There is or was a porn site that had a very similar URL to Google's but that's common knowledge and I'm sure you're fully aware of that.

or what about the infamouse www.whitehouse.com? Yah image my suprize when a paper our teacher gave us as a reference for Gov't class research pointed to a porn site instead.... luckily she didnt suffer any dire consequences for handing that out on research material due to the nature of the accident.

piersk

Originally posted by Merve
There is or was a porn site that had a very similar URL to Google's but that's common knowledge and I'm sure you're fully aware of that.

Booble!!

Remember kids, don't look at porn until you're legally old enough. You may end up like this

Weedpacket

Originally posted by piersk
Remember kids, don't look at porn until you're legally old enough. You may end up like this

Buuuuhhhhh ...... must .... view .... more .... pr0n .....

Gee, shouldn't knock it too much - I might lose business

piersk

Originally posted by Weedpacket
Gee, shouldn't knock it too much - I might lose business

You mean most of your business comes from underage kids???

Weedpacket

Originally posted by piersk
You mean most of your business comes from underage kids???

Only once they've ended up like that.