Your organisation's website is a reassuring presence on the computer screen: it's there as default when you log on to the net. You don't think much about what keeps it there: that's someone else's job. Then one day you log on; your URL comes up but the page is different: it's a maze of financial services or ones offering Viagra sales. It might even be a hardcore porn site.
What's happened? Your site has slipped down the fatal crevasse on the net: the awkward interface between your internet service provider (ISP) and the domain registration system.
Because the URL is the unique identifier of your site for the whole of the world wide web and that address is held on the server of your ISP, it is easy to forget that the domain and the URL are not identical and need to be maintained separately. At the level of the code, the domain name needs to be translated into the internet protocol (IP) address for the site to function. And to make sure you don't lapse, you need to keep your subs up to date to both the ISP and domain name registrar.
Neither can you afford to be late, even by hours, because a new breed of net predator has appeared - the nappers (as in caught napping).
These are organisations that trawl for expired domains, and install their own sites, rather like bacteriophages taking over a bacterium. There are two motives: they target sites with many hits - the Poetry Soci ety was a recent high-profile victim (300,000 hits a month) - and when they take over the site, they exploit these hits to try to sell their own wares.
Sometimes this seems a bit unlikely, as in the Christian sites reputedly hi-jacked by Russian porn operators, but you never know. If the site doesn't yield much, it can always be sold back to the original owner, who will then be relieved of both anxiety and a lot of cash.
One result is that, according to RuleSpace, an American web-filtering company, in the past 18 months, the number of web pages with "adult content" has grown almost four times as fast as the overall number of web pages.
So, why are so many web sites caught napping, and how can it be prevented? Internet service providers are legion but there are very few domain registrars. Ideally, since there can only be one domain for every site in the world, there should be one worldwide registrar. And there was, until three years ago: Network Solutions maintained the entire .com, .net and .org domain system, but the system was then deregulated.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) governs the technical and policy functions of higher level domains but registration is in the hands of many approved registrars worldwide. In the UK, there are eight such high-level registrars.
The Poetry Society's case is interesting because its one-time service provider Totalweb is also, unusually, a domain registrar. The Poetry Society's domain had been registered with Net work Solutions in 1998, but when the Society moved ISPs in 1999, the new ISP, Totalweb, asked Network Solutions to transfer the domain to their own registration arm, Totalregistrations, without telling the Poetry Society. The domain was then registered with a body other than the one understood by the Society to be the registrar.
In May 2001, the Poetry Society asked for its domain (www.poetrysoc.com) to be pointed to a new web host (Aitcom) because Totalweb didn't support a particular e-commerce function needed for the site.
The Society also asked for the administrative contact details on their domain name to be amended. Totalweb appears to have taken this as a request to transfer the domain name, but despite this did not make the transfer, nor did they amend the contact details, although they did point the domain to the new server as requested. The Poetry Society had no idea that their request for the administrative contact details to be changed had not been acted upon.
In January, Totalweb were told via email that poetrysoc. com was due for renewal. The email was sent to them because they had not updated the contact details as requested. Their own memo says: "No action taken as a domain transfer request form received for the domain poetrysoc.com." Therefore, their registration arm sent a delete request to the registry and the Poetry Society's domain name was deleted.
To cut a tangled business short: the Poetry Society's valued domain name had fallen between the cracks of the new ISP, Aitcom, the former ISP, Totalweb, and the registrar, Totalregistrations. Totalweb say: "When the domain name was hosted with Aitcom it should have been their responsibility to transfer the domain from the Totalregistrations registry to the one they use so as to avoid any complications at renewal time." They have not said why they didn't act upon their client's request in May 2001 or, if more information was required, why they didn't contact their client to explain.
The moral is that although you may think your ISP will tell you when the domain registration is lapsing, they probably won't. To be sure, you have to deal directly with the domain registrars.
The Poetry Society's story ended relatively happily. After vigorous work by Jane Mutimear of Bird and Bird, the intellectual property specialists, the company that snapped up the Society's domain agreed to return the web site to the Society, but not before considerable money had been spent on reprinting leaflets, setting up a new site, legal advice and so on.
If you're worried about your domain, you can check the status of a domain at any time, whether yours or somebody else's, by going to www.whois.net and typing in the URL. You can also find advice on the Icann site and InterNIC.
Some of the sites that did not find out in time and are in napping limbo are: the Hobby Electronics Mini Tutorial (now Free Picture Gang Bang); the Geosciences Information Centre (Free Lesbian Porn); the Balkan Institute (Big Girl) and the Bergenstein Literary Pages (Black Chick). There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such sites. I'm not going to give the URLS: you don't want to see what's on them now, do you?
