Hijacked Website? What to do? IT guys?
 

I recently joined the board of a local professional organization. It's sort of an "umbrella" for a bunch of professional societies that coordinates events, organizes and hosts an annual banquet, funds some student activities. I'm on the board of one of the local societies and was nominated as their representative to this organization.

I'm very new with these people and I'm just catching up with history and some of the personalities and personal relationships.

The most recent chairman is an IT guy and was launching a new website at about the time I joined the board. In the last 6 months he has gotten this website up to a high level of functionality. Our current chair is pushing to make this more available and useful to the member societies, particularly for scheduling and coordinating events and student activities.

The "old" website is becoming a problem. It's only up to date up to this time last year and it has no link to or acknowledgement of the new website. It's the website that comes up first in a Google search.

The "old" website is administered by a former chair, who has moved out of the area. She seems bitter that a new website was created, she claims ownership of the old website and she is strictly opposed to redirecting to the new website. She refuses to share the website password.

This is an immediate problem for us. Members of local societies are accustomed to going to the website to register for the annual banquet, but the old website doesn't have that.

I'm assuming that our current Web administrator understands our rights here, but can anyone hear provide advise?

Her (the former chair/old website admin) position doesn't seem openly malicious, just that "we" don't know what we are doing, that the new website isn't as good as the old one and that it's "best" if she maintains it the way it is.

Who owns the domain name for the old site? If you don't know, post the URL, or send it via PM if you don't want to post it. If the old chair person does not own the name, this is an easy fix.

Yup.

It’s all about who owns the domain name.

The recognized owner controls the DNS records and can point the site. Anywhere they want. Access to the current site is not needed, ever.

If she registered it in her name and not the organization you’ll need to challenge in court.

A simple letter from the organizations attornies may suffice, or not.

Depends on how bitter she is.

Point of order, is it the actual site she refuses to give access to or the domain registrar account where DNS is managed?

If it’s the registrar account she is holding hostage that may be solved with a phone call. Assuming of course that the organization pays the bill and not her.

I don't know who "owns" the the domain name.

She was chair about ten years ago. The site was created by a previous chair, who helped her with administration and is currently trying to help us.

She is claiming that a previous treasurer was more than 30 days late paying the registration, so she paid it and now she owns it. My understanding is that she was paying and the organization was reimbursing her.

No question there was some chaos under the last chairman - the current board is trying to get everything back in order and make the organization more effective. I have only been on the board since last fall, so I'm just getting up to speed on this.

We don't have an attorney - we are a non-profit with and annual budget under $10,000. Everyone involved is volunteering time. If we need to we will use an attorney.

Go here, https://whois.icann.org/en , enter your domain to see whats registered.

" There was a problem performing the lookup. Please try again later"

Well, define "30 days late"

Registrars send out renewal notices well in advance of the expiration date.

If she paid it before it actually expired then she does not own it. Yes she renewed it from her personal funds but that's not enough to convey transfer of ownership.

If it was past the renewal date and expired there is a small grace window that registrars often provide before putting it back on the open market. If she paid during that window the issue is grey. Technically it was expired and available but she only knew that through her affiliation and one can conclude her payment was for the benefit of the organization.

If it was past the renewal date and there was no grace period before going back on the open market when she paid then she owns it and you are pretty much SOL unless she is willing to be reasonable.

What is the domain name?

There is no harm in posting it publicly.

Since some of the board members who know her are trying to reason with her I don't want to make it a public issue.

There is some speculation that she wants to maintain the site as a sample for a website creation business.

You dont need your domain name for that. Pretty simple to screen shot or move to any other name to demo.

Agnes?

Original registrar was FastDomain, in 2018 she moved it to godaddy.

Up to 2016 she was listed as owner but the Corp was the organization.

in 2017 she removed the Corps info leaving just her as owner.

It looks like she has planned this for some time, she intends on keeping it and has removed any historical access you may have once had.

I think you've got a fight on your hands.

Hope you have documentation of the reimbursements and that they were specifically for the domain registrations / renewals cause if not you are pretty much, sorry to say, SOL.

Well, that's not gonna help her.

The site is built in Front Page.

I'm surprised it still works today.

The site she controls has not been updated since 2017.

It's no longer of value to anyone who may have been using it and becomes less valuable every day.

But you know that already.

It won't be long until no one goes there anymore, at all, so it's effectively dead and even getting control back at some point won't actually benefit you.

What you should do is register a new domain name that makes as much sense as it can and do an outreach campaign to known users to let them know about the change and rebuild.

Sounds painful but it'll be less work in the end than getting back something of no value.

Put another way, you are already at or close to the point where you'll need to do outreach and rebuild your visitor base anyway so why add dealing with her into the mix.

Thanks guys - I am not savvy about any of that. The fellow who has created our current website seems pretty savvy to me - he may have already worked out some or all of this.

In any case he has gotten us to the top of the Google search and he is building the new site every week.

As I said I am new to the group and only figured out that we were having trouble with her a couple of days ago.

Short term it is a problem because people are struggling to register for our banquet. Long term I am sure that we will build past it.

I will share this with the rest of the board. Thank you

Some basic SEO will help.

Simple stuff like generating an XML sitemap and submitting to google.

Question for the brain trust.....should the current website include a small notation that the old website is no longer valid? Or is this one of those best to just let sleeping dogs lie?

If it were me I would get a law office that knows computer law involved immediately!

Not even worth the phone call at this point.

The hourly you'd pay just to get the research done would easily fund an effective outreach program to update and redirect users.

The site is stale, not been updated since 2017.

Any visitors would think the organization is defunct.

Can you think of a new domain name? Will be much simpler.
Eventually, everyone will just bookmark the new website.

Make sure to let her know that the organization is disgusted with her petty behavior
And that she can keep her crappy 1999 website, and show her that the new website blows her amateur hour away.

The new website is already up and working well. Our big issue is that registration for our annual banquet is now and participants from a bunch of other organizations are used to going to the old site to register.

We are getting questions filtering back asking what is going on.

We don't have a good mechanism for notifying all the people in all the orgs.

Getting the search results reflecting our new site should be a big help. Minimal cooperation from the old webmaster would make the problem go away.

Thanks!