Help me out here .

Buying a domain after it expires

[Leva]

I've got a situation here where a very VERY closeknit community has developed over the last 10 years on a small, obscure web site. About 50-60 people, and a domain that's been in existance with chat rooms and bulletin boards and personal web sites. Members of the community meet regularly, there have even been a couple of marriages -- these are people who started out online as teenagers together and have kept in touch online for over a decade.

Unfortunately, the OWNER of the domain is AWOL. We don't know where he is. Phone calls, e-mails, etc. have gone unanswered. The phone is now disconnected. It's a mystery -- a pretty worrisome one, but I'll leave the major worrying to people who know him better.

The domain is now expired. It becomes available 8/27/06. I'm trying to save it for the community. It's probably not a high dollar domain -- only one other tld is owned by anyone -- but it's been in existance since 1995 and had a PR of 5 so the odds of it just quietly expiring and me being able to buy it then are low. Someone will get it and put ads on it, if nothing else.

I've put a substantial bid on the domain on snapnames.com. (It's registered through netsol.) What else, if anything, can I do to make sure that a scraper doesn't get it? I'd really hate to see this community lose their home ... yes, another domain can be registered, but the domain has a great deal of sentimental value to the community.

Thanks,

[Webwork]

Why don't you simply send the registrar a check to pay for the renewal? Chances are they won't look too closely at the check, except to see what domain name it relates to. You might also be able to do an online charge for the renewal. NetSol used to be very renewal friendly, never asking "Do you own this domain?" nor asking you to login. All you had to do was click on a renew domain link.

[edited by: Webwork at 5:51 pm (utc) on July 31, 2006]

[Leva]

The thought that I could just renew the domain ocurred to me, but without knowing what happened to the domain owner, I'm hesitant to do that. While I'm good friends with MANY of the people in this community -- I've known some of them since around 1994 when the community got its start on a college-run bulletin board and a mailing list -- I do not know the domain owner at all. One of the few people in this group that I don't know.

A complicating factor is that he also stopped paying for hosting a few months back. The host deleted the site around two months ago. Nobody seems to know who the host is to ask them if they have a backup of the site, if they'd even release it. I'm not sure how to research this.

So to save the site, I'm going to need to buy the domain, reassign the DNS to another host (it's a bandwidth hog of a site, too) salvage as much of the content from googlecache and wayback and people's hard drives whatever as we can, and rewrite/reinstall/recreate a fairly extensive database of user IDs and assorted backend scripts. Think large, sprawling, community-created site designed by a pack of artists, each with their own little corner. It's obscure except in its little corner of the internet ...

"Buying the domain" is the big thing I'm worried about. The rest will fall into place if I can clear that hurdle.

(OTOH, the guy who owns the domain may turn up. If he does, that makes things easier!)

Leva

[fitzer]

I'd suggest placing bids with a number of other domain back-order sites besides snapnames. If snapnames doesn't pick it up before one of the others, you won't have access to the auction.

[wmuser]

Snapnames is the only company which can pck up an expiring name from NetSol

Except placing a bid you can renew the name,no matter if original owner come back later,he will be thankfull for renewal

The same time its a good idea to try to find out the owner,maybe you could call his neighbors

[Leva]

Well, I finally got a working e-mail for the domain owner & it looks like we're going to sort things out. He's even volunteering to help rebuild things. Whew. Thanks for the suggestions, though.

It now turns out there are two issues -- the domain registration issue (which is now easily fixable) and the host itself. Apparently the host has gone kaput and all the content is lost, independent of the domain issue.

Ah, well. It will rise again, bigger and better than before. :)

Leva

[opifex]

Since this is a relatively small community why worry about the domain name? Purchase a new name and get the content available on whatever server and notify all concerned. Submit the new domain to DMOZ and all relavant SEs and keep on truckin'!

[Leva]

Purely sentimental reasons. :)

(This community is known BY their domain name -- i.e., if the domain name was "widget" they'd be the "widgeters". The widgeters without widget.com just isn't right.)

At any rate, I think we ARE going to get this resolved ... things are coming together.

Leva