As you may know, this site was a casualty of the recent RegisterFly meltdown. Notwithstanding some cordial emails from my ICANN Ombudsman (“… thank you for message. ICANN has forwarded your message to Registerfly and asked them to assist you.  Please let us know if they are unable to help you or if you do not hear from them in the next five days.”), and willingness but inability by the Good Guys at gandi.net to actually transfer my locked-up domains, I have felt pretty alone in this whole mess.

So I was thinking – what do you do when you’re feeling alone in the new era of social media? Why, start a website of course. Now there is already a pretty good community site, Registerflies.com where folks can commiserate and get status updates, but the itch I really want to scratch is this: how many of us out here are actually affected by RegisterFly’s failure? What actual sites are impacted? Any sites you’ve actually heard of?

Another itch that needs scratching is that there is no such thing as a “forwarding address” on the Internet when the old address is unresolvable. Makes sense right. The analogy in the real world is you have a donut shop and a nuclear blast hits it. Your customers can’t go to the old location and see the sign on the door pointing them to the new location. On the other hand, if you step outside DNS, there are myriad ways to do “forwarding address”. Only problem is, none of them have been formalized the way DNS has.

150px-aboutuslogonewNow starting another site is a fair amount of work even for a Ninja - and I sir, am no Ninja. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a ready-made site that hosted DNS meta-data and discussion?  A site editable and usable by all.  A free site where a guy could create a forwarding address registry for just this purpose. Well as it turns out there is just such a site operated by a bunch of renaissance wierdos out of Portland, Oregon. It’s called AboutUs.org and it hosts a page about every domain on the ‘Net. There’s a page for your blog. What’s more you can edit that page - and so can everyone else. The whole thing runs on MediaWiki so you can create any old page you want!

So without further ado, I introduce the RegisterFly Impact Registry. It’s my little social experiment. I’m really curious to see if folks will come and provide their data. And I’m really curious to see just how many people, and what kinds of services were disrupted by this whole fiasco.