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It is mid-July. Until events of the last two weeks had transpired, I thought I would be offering a very different editorial statement in this issue. This little Zine faced some serious challenges before the Winter 2007 issue was released. We met with the personal chaos caused by a house fire, and, as the Zine’s web wizards and editors, we suffered interrupted access to the internet over a two-month period. It was very difficult to keep in touch with submissions or meet our mandate effectively. Of necessity, we extended our deadline for that issue. Yet, a clear vision and sense of purpose helped to drive us forward. Who could have guessed that before its next issue was released, the Zine itself would face a long interruption on the internet that threatened to shut us down for good just a year after our founding?! Yes, as we celebrated the beginning of our second year, we were forced to move to a new domain (dropping the ‘s’ from Rumours) to survive. The original site has been crashed and locked out of use by our previous internet host. After a year of countless down-times and poor responses to our request for service, we decided to transfer to a new internet host. Unfortunately, the original host demonstrated how unscrupulous they were as we prepared to transfer. We began that relationship with blind trust, asking superuser.net to buy our domain as part of a hosting package. Little did we realize, they served their own interests ahead of ours, buying the domain in their name instead of ours. We contacted the registering body, and they were sympathetic because there were so many similar complaints registered against this hosting company. However, the long and short of it is we could not rescue our domain big-pond-rumours.com. It was registered in superuser.net’s name. Now, both of my original domains had been crashed by superuser.net. They seemed to have decided, if we did not stay with them no one would have us. We were fully paid up and one site was paid ahead until June 2008, so money was not the issue. Domain ownership was the single power they held over us. Eventually, I was able to prove I was the true owner of sharon-berg.com (mainly because the domain is my name) but I simply could not rescue the Zine and Press site. Determined I would not be shut-down through their bullheaded gangster tactics, I purchased a twin presence on the www instead; big-pond-rumour.com. We have learned a hard lesson, folks. I feel an urgency to share it with you in the hope no one else will suffer the same catastrophe. Buy your own domain, registering it in your own name, and never give up the password control of your domain to others! One contributor to our premiere issue commented that the www is a wilderness, that even the word ‘domain’ harkens back to the feudalism in human history. Other supporters congratulated us on surviving this ‘tooth and nail’ struggle. Truly, we operate on the ’frontier’ in many regards. We emerge from our struggle in slightly different form, loosing the ‘s’ in rumours being (we hope) the main damage. There will be some broken links in various listing services though we tried to notify the organizations and individuals involved. Yet, the experience has not dampened our spirits. Indeed, it served to re-charge us with the importance of our original mission, which is a wagon trail across another wild (sometimes unfriendly) frontier. |
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