forced hiatus

By anders pearson 23 Jul 2007

For once, I have a good excuse for not posting anything here lately. Usually I don’t post for months at a time and it’s just out of laziness and a lack of anything interesting to write about. I’m not saying that wasn’t also the case this time, but this time I can at least pretend it was something else preventing me from posting.

Many of you noticed that thraxil.org was offline for the last month or so.

The root cause was that registerfly.com, the registrar that I’d registered my domains through, lost their ICANN accreditation for generally being sleazy. They transferred the domains in their control to a couple other registrars. Last time I renewed thraxil.org, I paid for a couple years at once to minimize the chances that it would expire on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Somehow, that got lost when they transfered it and the domain expired in June, a year before I was expecting it to.

Normally, a domain expiring isn’t that big a deal. ICANN gives you a 40 day grace period where the original owner is allowed to renew their domain without penalty and domain squatters can’t get it. This generally works pretty well to eliminate the really predatory domain squatting. However, you can only renew the domain through the original registrar. This obviously was a problem for me. I couldn’t renew it through registerfly since they were no longer accredited. Registerfly couldn’t give me the transfer authorization codes that I needed to transfer the domain to a different registrar because the domain was expired. As far as I can tell, there just isn’t a clear procedure in place for how to deal with the situation of an expired domain on a defunct registrar.

I won’t even bother going further into what I had to do to get everything back up. Obviously it involved a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that made me want to embrace violence as a problem solving technique. There was also a round of me having to prove my identity via several easily forged tokens (screenshots of my account page? emailing a scan of my photo id? ) that didn’t exactly make me feel secure with the general process.

Anyway, we’re back online now so I have no more excuses.

Tags: meta dns icann bureaucracy stabstabstab