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What's going on with Realclimate.org?
Great site, but it seems they let the domain expire? How long before it becomes available for someone else to scoop it up once it's expired?
http://realclimate.org/
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
From my RSS feed for them (though the URL they redirect to - http://realclimate-backup.org/ - is currently:
"503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."
After a few years under the SCN ISP account, we went it alone a couple of years ago. This is probably something we should have done at the start, but we were scientists, not website engineers. We still aren’t web gurus, but experience over the years has made this far easier. Nonetheless, the domainame was still registered with Betsy. This wouldn’t have been a problem, but Betsy long ago left EMS, so the email bounces, the phone number has long been out-of-service and SCN has no records of Betsy’s online accounts, and this domain registration is not part of their portfolio.
This is where it gets tricky. The domainname registration was with Active-Domain.com. If you go to their website, there is no way to get in touch with them except through their contact form – no phone numbers, addresses etc. And quite often in our experience, their contact form doesn’t work at all. We have been trying for months to get hold of someone at Active-Domain.com to ask what would be required to amend the registration info to something current. Unfortunately, no responses have been forthcoming, and frankly, this slipped off our radar.
On Nov 16, the registration actually expired. For some people, going to realclimate.org led you to a page asking you to renew the registration, but without the Betsy Ensley’s or the EMS login credentials you can’t do anything. None of the emails and support tickets we have sent since to Active-Domain.com have been responded to. Worse, some people have reported that the domain has in fact been hijacked to point to some malware and spammer sites. Website hijacking is of course a big deal – as this recent Science News story about journal websites makes clear.
...
So, a few requests for our readers: Does anyone know anyone at Active-Domain.com that we can actually talk to? Similarly, does anyone have any experience amending out-of-date domain registration records? What is actually required? Given the state of flux in URLs, we imagine that this must be quite a common occurrence. We obviously would like to deal with this before the domain becomes free again, so any suggestions are welcome.
This is where it gets tricky. The domainname registration was with Active-Domain.com. If you go to their website, there is no way to get in touch with them except through their contact form – no phone numbers, addresses etc. And quite often in our experience, their contact form doesn’t work at all. We have been trying for months to get hold of someone at Active-Domain.com to ask what would be required to amend the registration info to something current. Unfortunately, no responses have been forthcoming, and frankly, this slipped off our radar.
On Nov 16, the registration actually expired. For some people, going to realclimate.org led you to a page asking you to renew the registration, but without the Betsy Ensley’s or the EMS login credentials you can’t do anything. None of the emails and support tickets we have sent since to Active-Domain.com have been responded to. Worse, some people have reported that the domain has in fact been hijacked to point to some malware and spammer sites. Website hijacking is of course a big deal – as this recent Science News story about journal websites makes clear.
...
So, a few requests for our readers: Does anyone know anyone at Active-Domain.com that we can actually talk to? Similarly, does anyone have any experience amending out-of-date domain registration records? What is actually required? Given the state of flux in URLs, we imagine that this must be quite a common occurrence. We obviously would like to deal with this before the domain becomes free again, so any suggestions are welcome.
