lsery.org registered to some "entity" in the Cayman Islands. This makes 2 cases in as many months that I've seen - another Midwest museum got jacked because of a multilayered snafu.

Listen up, folks. Domain names are a shady, nasty business full of crooks and swindlers. Protect yourself.

The most common mistake is neglecting to renew on time. The domain sharks have lists of every expiring domain, they have analyzed which ones have high traffic and referrals and are ready to pounce. Any active railway museum will meet their criteria.

The #1 cause is neglecting to renew your domain name. I took a quick survey of the biggest railway museums and found that MOST OF YOU register your domain name only 1-2 years in advance, and renew it like a magazine subscription. They rely on the email - which can go missing. They have credit card auto-renew, which can fail. They rely on the grace period, and the site going "off the air" during that grace period -- it may stay up.

Go to http://www.pir.org/ or http://www.who.is/ and put in your domain name. Look for "Expiration date". Is it less then 5 years out? Call up your registrar and add years to it. You can be registered up to 10 years forward. Right
Wrong

This costs about $10/year at most registrars, it's cheaper than a subscription to TRAINS. If your registrar is GoDaddy, give them checkout code WOW3 for $5 off.

I've been a big fan of 1and1.com, for a number of years. They do auto renewal and pretty cheap hosting.

If any museum or organization out there is in need of some quick web consulting, I'd be very happy to help.

I know domains, etc are a shady business, so I'll toss out my professional credentials. I'm currently a multi-faceted web developer specializing in web content management systems with The Berndt Group in Baltimore MD and the CIO (essentially) of the Conrail Historical Society.

I've never welded, but I'm happy to do what I can with my skills in the RR Preservation game.

This is seriously good advice.

Unfortunately, for many museums, the web operations are an ongoing headache and the "webmaster" role a revolving door, so here is another tip: have an email address for your organization and use that for important business. Do not let your domain names and similar registrations end up on the personal email account of one of your members or officers.

Rob

The system used by the Soo Line Historical & Technical Society has worked well for years. All the positions have "official" e-mail addresses, such as president@sooline.org, editor@sooline.org, etc. The webmaster adds a redirect from that address to the private address of the person then filling the position; when the person changes, it's a simple matter to seamlessly redirect the e-mail to the new person. The e-mail addresses on the web site contact page never need to be changed, and those that were published in the society magazine years ago are still current.

It's true, the role of webmaster is complicated and hard to fill. And it's one of those endless kinds of jobs that can always be done better.

But don't let that intimidate you from the very easy job of "make sure the domain name has some years on it" :) Your group can survive a stale website, but it would be a real setback to irrevocably lose, say... irm.org or csrmf.org or trolleymuseum.org.

We (Sunshine Software, Inc.) host rypn.org, steamlocomotive.com, steamlocomotive.info and a host of other rail related sites (and many, many non-rail related sites).

As a matter of course, when we begin hosting a site, we suggest that the domain owner transfer the site's registration to our registrar, while retaining ownership of the domain. In this way, when the domain is part of our corporate account at the registrar we can and do place the registration on "Auto Renew". In this way, our hosting customers NEVER experience this problem. Do we get burned thereby? Sure, often enough to be mildly annoying, but at least our customers stay happy.

Doug Bailey
Sunshine Software, Inc.