Zombie Website!

[sdelmonte]

There is a website called NY.com. It bills itself as the "paperless guide to New York" and has all sorts of listings for museums, nightlife, theater, and so forth. Because of its domain name, a lot of tourists go to it to get information about things.

I know this because a lot of those tourists will show up here, expecting to pay $8, or to get in free on a Tuesday night. The site has not been updated in years. Indeed, the e-mails addresses provided on the site are useless, and every effort to contact the web designer for the site goes nowhere. But the site is still there. It will never be changed, never be updated, and tourists will continue to get bad information and then blame us for not fixing it, little knowing that there is no way to fix it.

It's not merely a dead site. Dead sites tend to give you some kind of message, a 404 not Fobnd, or an error message or a link to an ad selling the domain name. No, this is a zombie site, festering and rotting and yet still there, thinking it's alive, infecting tourists with useless information.

Anyone out there know if eventually this coveted domain name will expire and thus a new site will replace the old? Or will this undead shambling mess of outdated data haunt me forver?

Comments

[poltr1]

Shame on them for not updating their website. And shame on me for not updating mine since 1996. :|

Anyway, I did a whois lookup at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp and found some useful information on ny.com, including who the domain is registered to (Mediabridge Infosystems), when it expires (June 2010), and an administrative contact (with phone number!)

[sdelmonte]

Alas, the Mediabridge is out. We've tried to contact them for ages, as well, to no avial. I did try that phone number again just now, but I doubt I will hear from them.

2010...we have to wait three more years. Just great.

But thanks for your help with this.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Theoretically, by law anyone who registers a domanin name has to provide the registration company with a way to reach them. If you still can't reach the company, you might contact their registrar and explain the problem. If the registrar discovers that the owner hasn't kept their address info up to date, the registrar might be able to pull the plug.

[ljcygnet.livejournal.com]

That domain would be worth ... large amounts of money. Impressively large amounts of money. Very impressively large amounts of money. Two letter domains as a rule go for LOTS of money and one like NY.com ... wow. They're also probably making a fortune on the advertising revenue from typeins alone.

I'm betting the company holding the domain probably has lots and lots of similar domains that they're doing the same thing with. They don't care about accuracy -- they're all about an easy profit on the ad revenue.

[immortalthief.livejournal.com]

Sadly the best way to go about this escpecially if the company isn't responding directly to you is to call Network Solutions, They can't directly change the site or give you contact information but they can relay your message to their client.

I know it's frustrating. Just remember that the people at Newtowk Solutions are limited in what they are allowed to do without their clients permission.

[poltr1]

You're welcome.

If you don't hear from them, I wonder if it's worth hiring an attorney to draft up a demand letter to implore them to update their site.

[nightstalker.livejournal.com]

It says on the bottom, (c)1994-2007. Someone must have updated that...

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

Updating the copyright date could be automated.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Per RFC 2142 someone should be monitoring (and responding to) webmaster@ny.com and www@ny.com as they have public web services. abuse@ should also be functioning. Failure to respond to these can be considered cause for the domains to be delisted if you want to push the issue, but I have no idea what the process is.