Domain Squatters
Posted on Tue 19 July 2005 by alex in general
Annoyingly it seems someone thought songofsteel.org was a worthwhile domain to squat on and have accordingly snarfed it as soon is came out of the renewal period. Some background may be in order.
Back in 2000 we registered the domain name songofsteel.org to replace the rather less memorable www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~richc/sos/sos.html. Now domain names have to be re-registered at intervals and at the time I think I registered it for the maximum 5 years. A few months ago the domain expired and the name songofsteel.org dropped off the virtual internet landscape. Unfortunately I had used my old hotmail account to register the domain and when the renewal came about I had no idea what my password was to log into the Network Solutions website and complete the renewal. I did try and contact them to get the account password reset (the hotmail account being long dead) but there automated answer was basically "wait for the renewal period to expire and then everyone gets a chance to buy the domain". It was followed by a "by the way someone will probably buy the domain then and attempt to sell it to you for a profit". I thought there wasn't much commercial interest in a .org domain currently used by a non-profit LRP club so I'd just have to wait until the renewal period to expire and re-purchase the domain.
It seems I was a little nieve. The songofsteel.org website now points at a link farm. Despite the token "under construction" notice I'm assuming the process is automated as the link farm does point at various steel related websites rather than having anything to do with LRP. So now time to pick a new domain name for SoS. In the meantime could anyone who links to SoS update their bookmarks to the new url www.songofsteel.org.uk so the domain squatting c**ts don't get the benefit of misplaced links.
UPDATE
The wonderfully efficient spondula has pre-empted the crisis by registering www.songofsteel.org.uk. Update your bookmarks!
UPDATE 2
As suspected the affor mentioned c**nts want $850 to sell the domain back to us. Screw them :-(