What ever happened to the old
WarrenJaycees.com? Why is it now Warren
PAJaycees.com? It's a long story.
As you Warrenites know, The
Warren Jaycees have had an online presence longer than some of the major companies in Warren. We predated
WarrenPA.us,
HellIfICare.com, and
VoteWarren.org. It's been around around almost as long as the now defunct
WeLoveWarren.com and the still-running,
WarrenNet.com (probably the oldest),
TimesObserver.com and our local major industries like
Blair &
Whirley Industries.
Since 1998, the Jaycees site has gone through several "free site" URLs, incarnations & even more changes, originally hosted with civic-clubs.com as a free site, they went defunct, and we moved to
WorldZone.net. It stayed there as a free site for over a year. Then as another incarnation on WorldZone took place, they suddently changed their Free Website packages. Yet another URL for Warren Jaycees.
Eventually, it became part of my personal Penn.com account, an account that would sty put for years! So I thought, until they were ruthlessly taken over by Earthlink, in which I spent 3 months trying to prove to them that my bill was paid for the next 6 months.
After the Earthlink fiasco was done, we, as a chapter decided we needed our own domain name. As always, I was still the webmaster. We chose WarrenJaycees.com, narrowly beating out the
Warren, Michigan Jaycees for the domain name. Now, we had a permanent place for our website.
Or so we thought.
One of the problems of membership-driven organizations is that people like the treasurer, the secretary, president, and in some cases (but not ours) the webmaster, changes from year to year. When it comes to domain names, over the years, when people come and go, these names & accounts can get lost; which was the case for warrenjaycees.com.
The original treasurer who bought & paid for the domain name, left the account in an old email address, no longer used. When the renewal notices came in, they fell upon deaf inboxes. We as the chapter had no idea, since this is all supposed to be taken care of by... the treasurer. But as with an organization such as the Jaycees, the old treasurer is no longer the new treasurer, and bills such as this sometimes get lost.
But then the worst possible scenario happened. The domain fell upon a group called,
NOLDC.
com. They claim to be from New Orleans, but enough google searches shows them to be from Kenya. They buy up expired domain names & offer them back to the original owners for hundreds of dollars. They never made an offer to us, but we knew the domain was lost.
Hence the newest & much more stable incarnation, www.WarrenPAJaycees.com. As the Jaycees' web admin for almost 10 years, now that I have this power, with this one, I now own the domain name personally, provide the hosting, provide updates (along with Mike Sharp, from the
Russell Roller Rink), and maintain the server & email.
If this gives a nice heads-up to other organizations out there to teach you how to manage a non-profit domain or membership organization domain, then the job is done. Watch your ASSets. It's a shame this didn't reach the Warren, Michigan Jaycees sooner. If you bothered to click on their link, by the looks of it, they lost theirs too.
Labels: How To, TeraScape, Warren, Warren Jaycees
