Did somebody steal VOTF’s domain name?

A reader emailed me last Saturday to ask what was up with Voice of the Faithful’s web site? He had noticed that for a couple of days, their web site, which has been at votf.org for several years now has been showing a test page from an initial install of the Red Hat Apache web server. That’s not a good sign. I figured they had some kind of glitch with their server and it would be back in a few days.

So today when I received an email announcement from them (I’m on their email list anonymously), I clicked on the link to their web page and up it came. But then I noticed that the address was different: www.votf.net. What’s going on? There’s no notice on the page, nothing in the email, so I went to Network Solutions’ Whois database and found out that the votf.org domain name is registered to some company in Spain. A similar search for votf.net, shows that this one is registered to Voice of the Faithful itself.

So what’s the story? Did VOTF let its domain registration lapse so that it got swept up by one of those domain squatters? Did someone steal the domain from them? Losing your domain name, especially one you’ve had for years, is very bad. It’s like a retail store moving in the middle of the night without leaving a forwarding address. And they haven’t bothered to email their members to tell them of the change, at least as far as I’ve seen.

As I’ve said before, VOTF is fading into the irrelevancy of all heterodox groups like Call to Action and FutureChurch and this is just one more example.

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