Expired domain name

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

I've just noticed that a domain name for an English chess club has expired some time in the last few days. I can't see any obvious contact information for any officials at the club. What do you think the best way to handle this is? Options seem to be:

1) Register it myself and hand it over when I can get in touch with an official
2) Keep trying to find contact information for an official so they can register it themselves

Option 1) will leave me a few pounds out of pocket for the transfer fees, or as much as £20 if the club actually don't want the domain name any more and I'm stuck with it.

I'm a bit worried because sometimes expired domain names are grabbed by gambling or shopping websites (or worse!) and then it's gone forever.

[Geoff Chandler]

Hi Jon,

Get in touch with the club asap.
By coincidence just an hour ago I was looking at chessgames and one of the shortest games is 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Ke7 3.Qxe5 mate with Eric Schiller white. On his opponent's page, Howery Pack, he gives a link to a list of all the books he has written and out of curiousity I had a look.

https://www.afternic.com/forsale/www.er ... id=daslnc&

Nothing but a sign saying 'www ericschiller.com.' is now up for sale and it can be yours for £2,216.63.

[John Townsend]

Jon, I would prefer option 2).

Assuming the club is still active, it probably has one or more teams in a local league, so one approach might be to get in touch with the league's secretary (or local equivalent) to ask for the club's contact details.

[John Townsend]

Geoff Chandler wrote:

"Nothing but a sign saying 'www ericschiller.com.' is now up for sale and it can be yours for £2,216.63."

Has Edward Winter been alerted to this opportunity?

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

The domain name has now been registered. Hopefully by one of the people I tried to email yesterday (no-one actually replied to me so I wasn't sure it the email addresses were still valid).

whois.png (8.83 KiB) Viewed 1973 times

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Nothing but a sign saying 'www ericschiller.com.' is now up for sale and it can be yours for £2,216.63.

I checked on www.archive.org and it seems that ericschiller.com was being offered for sale at least a few years before Eric actually died in 2018.
Here is one archived page to show what it used to look like when he was still using it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130907020 ... iller.com/
The link "Chess Books" on that page works.

[Geoff Chandler]

Thanks Jon, Good luck tracking down the club.