

Club Penguin Goes Down After Disney Fails To Renew Domain Name - profitbaron
http://mashable.com/2011/06/20/club-penguin-offline/

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ck2
Reminds me of when Microsoft forgot to renew passport.com so someone just made
their own payment to get it back online. They they did it again with
hotmail.co.uk

Just do 10 year registrations for $100 and get it over with.

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dudurocha
someone payed for use the mail, or to hijack the domain?

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ck2
In the first situation someone paid $35 to get passport.com renewed for
microsoft (before it completely dropped). This was back in 1999 when the
internet was a tad more well behaved.

Hotmail.co.uk went through a complete drop and was simply re-registered by
someone before Microsoft even cared.

In neither case was the domain hijacked though. The drop cycle is nearly 60
days and the domain would be dead for at least 45 of those.

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astrodust
There was a time when you could volunteer to pay for anyone's domain simply by
using Verisign. Even further back and anyone who could fill in a form could
get a domain for free.

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dangrossman
I've been anonymously paying for the domain name of a local charity for almost
a decade. The registrar they use doesn't care who renews a domain, anyone can
mail in the form with payment and a domain they control written in.

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coderdude
It's humorous how the Club Penguin blog describes what happened:

"As some of you heard, Club Penguin's domain name (clubpenguin.com) had a
technical glitch this weekend. The technical glitch has been fixed, but it
will take some time for the site to appear as it should around the world."

Really it was a billing glitch, but a technical glitch sounds so much more
forgivable.

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baconface
Anyone know how much it cost ClubPenguin to get the domain name back?

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radq
Not much. Typically there is a 60 day vesting period (I am not sure if that is
the correct length or name) when the domain is still in the control of the
registrar and the owner can pay them a fee (it was $100 for my previous
registrar) to get the domain back.

<http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/gtld-lifecycle.htm>

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bigiain
I've been involved in trying to rectify this sort of mistake before...

At least with .com.au domains, there's not a lot of risk of losing a recently
expired domain, what you do suffer is a ~$100 vig for the registrar to
"expedite the re-registration"...

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Luyt
Some companies will squeeze money out of everything when they get the chance,
this reminds me of a €13 'administrative processing' surcharge I recently got
on a €7.50 invoice I forgot to pay.

