Expire, Just Blame the Registrar — When Domains

Registrars take the blame for forgetful clients.

When you screw up and don’t renew your domain name, just blame the registrar when you talk to the press.

I see that happen all the time. Here’s another example.

Liberal blog RIfuture.org let its domain name expire on February 24. As is standard practice, domain registrar eNom replaced the DNS for the domain and pointed it to a parked page.

But you wouldn’t blame the owner of the domain if you read this article titled “Secretive Washington firm snatches RIFuture.org”:

…International records show the rifuture.org domain name was taken over around 11:30 a.m. Friday by eNom Inc., a Bellevue-based registration service and subsidiary of Demand Media, the infamous content farm that’s one of the major reasons Google is being forced to make sizable-scale changes to its search engine.

The records say eNom’s ownership of rifuture.org is good until February 2012.

Brian Hull, who bought Rhode Island’s Future in mid-2009, told me Wednesday he’s working on regaining control of the site’s domain name from eNom and is confident he will succeed, although he doesn’t know how long it will take.

“It will come back,” Hull stated. “There’s just some issues I need to try and work out with it.”

“Some issues” means Hull needs to pay his bill. Which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the article.

It’s also inaccurate that eNom now owns the domain through February 2012. The domain is actually in “Auto Renew Period”, which means the .org registry tacked a year onto the expiration date, not eNom.

Another political blog states:

It’s going on 5 days (or so) since RIFuture.org was “taken over” by one of those ISP vultures.

Sigh.

Now, that’s not to say that eNom won’t eventually take this domain and keep it in its portfolio. But don’t blame eNom right now — blame the guy who forgot to renew his domain name.

eNom isn’t the only domain registrar to take attacks like this. The same thing happened when backup service CrashPlan.com forgot to renew its domain at Go Daddy. The firm tweeted that Go Daddy “mistakenly removed our root nameserver entry”, “inappropriately took over our DNS”, and did a DNS “hijack”.