Blog glitch plus dirty work at the crossroads

Probably everyone who attempted to visit the Climate Plus site on Wednesday and Thursday 14-15 June found a notice saying the domain name had expired, if they found anything at all.

In simple terms the domain name of the site was due to expire on 11 June. We thought it was on automatic renewal, but that turned out not to be so. Turns out there was more to it than that. The interwebs is a place where it seems the normal ethical rules don’t apply.

If you go to our About page you will find:

    Thanks to tigtog at VIVidWeb for customising and setting up this site, which is powered by WordPress and hosted by DreamHost.

If you click on the link, you will find that Viv, who is our webmaster “reads, cooks, blogs and sings when she’s not building websites.”

Clicking further, you’ll find she is:

    Webwrangler, singer, writer, blogger, and comedy tragic.

    Juggling my family, three cats, a garden, a baby grand piano, just enough wine-racks and far too few bookshelves.

In addition to that she has a full-time job, and when she was going to attend to our little problem during her lunch hour she was evacuated from the building for no reason that was problematic. My experience when I worked in the big smoke was that when they tell you to go, you go, or you may be carried out.

The arrangement is that Viv’s company arranges our domain name renewal from a domain name provider. It used to be an outfit called Aussie HQ, but they sold their clients to TPP. However, as the registrant my email is there and I was being contacted by donotreply at namesercices.com referring me to enom, who had me as a customer under the Aussie HQ rubric.

This might be a computer stuff-up, but it also looks like an attempt to poach back the customers you’ve just sold.

I contemplated mortality as a site. I’m not finished yet and I would prefer a more orderly and graceful exit. However, for two days we’ve been effectively dead. My plan is to do a post on the Trump-Korea thing tonight, then spend time on Saturday emailing people who have commented and anyone else that may be interested, telling them that reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

The blog would have existed all the time at our host Dreamhost, on a computer somewhere in the USA.

Meanwhile I did check the National Library Pandora archive, and confirmed that Climate Plus is there, albeit they seem to archive once a year, in August.

8 thoughts on “Blog glitch plus dirty work at the crossroads”

  1. When I had to reorganise my websites amd names recently the guys who did that for me pointed out that there are only three primary name registries in the world, the rest are sub agents, and one of those registries, Crazy Domains is Australian. The sub agents are the most likely to fail or change hands and for that reason it is safer for an Australian company to register names with the native Australian registry direct. TIAIHI ( that is as I heard it).

  2. Thanks, Ambi and BilB.

    Just to let you all know that I received yet another email this afternoon from Aussie HQ telling me the domain name had expired and directing me to enom.

    There could be more chicanery afoot before we are finished.

    It actually looks as though they sold their client list twice.

  3. Brian,

    Climateplus.info was Missing In Action on Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th, and then yesterday afternoon. All because, as you suggest:

    …when she was going to attend to our little problem during her lunch hour she was evacuated from the building for no reason that was problematic.

    I’m puzzled how a small glitch can progress for what seems to me for about 2.5 days offline.

    Are you upsetting the powerful people, Brian? Is someone trying to silence you and your messages? Or is it just a pure and simple ‘cock up’ – nothing nefarious/sinister?

  4. Geoff M, Viv’s missed Thursday lunch hour was 25 hours after I first emailed her, so that was never a cause. I assume she doesn’t check her private email every 10 minutes, and I had work commitments on both Wednesday and Thursday when I don’t have access to the net. On Wednesday I didn’t know Viv’s mobile number. I found it overnight, we communicated Thursday morning, but just as she was going off to work.

    I don’t think it’s foul play. I think the emails sent to me are automatically generated, but Aussie HQ having sold a list of Viv’s clients to TPP seem to have then done a deal with enom.

    So that would be naughty and more than a ‘cock up’.

    I don’t think there was an intelligent mind behind the specific emails directed to me. I think I was just the unlucky first on the list.

  5. Brian: Glad you are back. I was concerned that something had happened to you personally and was going to contact John Davidson later today to see if you were alright.

    By coincidence, this has happened just when I have been watching the Australian Defence Force wrecking itself with confusion. Not only has the Australian military failed to adapt to the massive changes in the nature of conflict and conquest – but – in what has happened to you, for an example, the Australian legal system seems to have failed to adapt effectively to public use of the internet.

    Despite the herd of legal academics, eminent Senior Counsel and technical wallahs using the internet 24/7 and churning out many Petabytes of stuff on the issues, it is still like the lawless Wild West when customers deal with entities doing business with the internet. Going online seems to be a sort of enforced gambling: take a punt on what you think is an agreement or service coming home; although winning does happen often enough for you to keep on betting. And I can’t see that situation changing in my lifetime – so we just have to make the best of it.

    Cheers..

  6. Thanks, Graham.

    While all that was going on I was rung several times with people with Asian accents. On my mobile, so someone has shopped it around. One was flat out asking for personal information, the other claimed to be from Telstra, saying they had noticed problems with our service over the last few days.

    As it happened we had been having issues, but with how the wifi works around the house, which I don’t think he’d notice. Any way I told him that when I wanted Telstra I’d ring them.

    I feel a bit sorry for these people who have to earn a crust working for a scammer. OTOH there must be enough people being sucked in for the calls to keep coming.

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