Secretive Washington company snatches RIFuture.org
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:40 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
What does a company in Bellevue, Wash., want with Rhode Island’s Future?
The pioneering liberal blog disappeared from the Web a few days ago and was replaced with that ubiquitous photo of an attractive young woman with a backpack and a series of links hawking gold and stock options.
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 large-scale changes to its search engine.
The records say eNom’s ownership of rifuture.org is good until February 2012. [Or does it? See update.]
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 said. “There’s just some issues I need to try and work out with it.”
This isn’t the first time a popular local blog has temporarily lost its domain name. Anchor Rising went through the same thing a few years ago, though AR contributor Mark Comtois wrote today, ”It appears as if the management over at RIF is having a more difficult time than we did.”
Registration records do not give a live phone number for eNom; phone calls are directed to its Whois Privacy Protection Service division. A call to Whois Privacy Protection’s number led to an answering machine – with a full mailbox – that suggested sending questions to an e-mail address.
I tracked down a phone number for eNom’s office in Bellevue and spoke briefly with a technical support representative there. He was unable to provide further details beyond what the records show, but said he would pass my message along to his supervisor. I’ll update if I get a call back.
Update: Domain Name Wire says the blame for this should fall squarely on Rhode Island’s Future, not eNom:
When you screw up and don’t renew your domain name, just blame the registrar when you talk to the press. …
“Some issues” means Hull needs to pay his bill. Which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the [WPRI.com] 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. …
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 company tweeted that Go Daddy “mistakenly removed our root nameserver entry”, “inappropriately took over our DNS”, and did a DNS “hijack”.
Update #2: E. Greenwich firm keeping RIFuture in Web purgatory (March 3)
Tags: blogs, brian hull, demand media, digital media, digital news, enom, internet, media, rhode island's future, rifuture, Technology
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
Thanks for getting to the bottom of the story Ted. I have to wonder why RIFuture itself wasn’t putting any information out about this. They have Twitter and Facebook accounts.
So is this a case of Demand Media having a buy order on the domain when it expired and RIFuture not being on top of the expiration date, or is there some way that Demand Media got the domain out from under them?
I didn’t ask Hull explicitly, but it appears to me that RIFuture accidentally allowed the domain to expire and Demand jumped on it. Since eNom is also a domain registrar (similar to GoDaddy, etc) it may be that eNom was on top of it because the domain was registered through them – but that is pure, non-reporting speculation on my part.
Thanks Ted. I was going a little nuts just with curiosity!
Ted – Enom is a (much larger) competitor of ours but from what I can tell they did nothing wrong here. The customer didn’t pay for the domain and enom deactivated the name as is industry standard practice. Demand Media owns enom which has nothing to do with this situation at all. The customer should be able to easily get the name back (at this point) if they pay whatever is due to the registrar.
By the way, what appears to be for sure Brian’s other domain name see: http://www.brianhull.net also has privacy protection.
You can find this information in our whois, make
sure you search for the .net not the .com
http://nswhois.DomainRegistry.com
Ben, thanks sincerely for chiming in with an expert perspective here. It sounded as though Hull was having more trouble than your comment would suggest he should be in terms of getting the domain back; perhaps something’s getting lost in translation, or there’s more to the story. I will say I stand by the fact that eNom does not make it easy to contact them with press inquiries.
[...] you wouldn’t blame the owner of the domain if you read this article titled “Secretive Washington company snatches RIFuture.org”: …International records show the rifuture.org domain name was taken over around 11:30 a.m. [...]
[...] you wouldn’t blame the owner of the domain if you read this article titled “Secretive Washington company snatches RIFuture.org”: …International records show the rifuture.org domain name was taken over around 11:30 a.m. [...]
To affirm: Anchor Rising has had that same picture appear, once (early on) because the domain renew date snuck up on me and once because our host botched the automatic renew the following year. Both times, I paid the bill by credit card within hours of discovering the problem, and we were back up and repopulated across the Web within a day.
The eNom picture, in other words, is really just a placeholder, to my experience.
[...] powerhouse back in the Matt Jerzyk era. Nesi did a great job in sleuthing out how RI’s Future got taken for an unexpected ride. And current owner Brian Hull tells ProJo he’ll hand over the blog for [...]
[...] I reported yesterday, liberal blog Rhode Island’s Future lost its home on the Web, rifuture.org, when its domain [...]
It’ll be nice if someone from eNom does return your call. Generally speaking, though, businesses shouldn’t really give specific client information to third parties, should they?
No, probably not – but then again that’s kind of my whole job, to ask impertinent questions, frequenty to no avail.
The page and image that is displayed on the website is a generic page, it is also known as a “link farm” This page is put up by hosting companies that grab expired domains. I have dealt personally with eNom in the past through a company that was called Saving Hosting and they were located in New Jersey. They are a very difficult company to get a hold of and to get answers from.
If this site was originally hosted on GoDaddy, anyone can subscribe to a list (for a fee) of expired domain names that GoDaddy had hosted. They even offer an auction for expired domain names in which they will sell the domain name to the highest bidder, plus a fee.
Basically the answer to businesses out there is to keep track of their domain names and when they expire. This problem happen quite often when you go with a discount hosting company or domain registrar.