A big thank you to IDG from thestandard.nz

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 am, April 16th, 2016 - 15 comments
Categories: admin, the praiseworthy and the pitiful, The Standard - Tags: ,

Courtesy of the IDG group who own thestandard.co.nz, we are able to shorten our address from thestandard.org.nz to our brand new name of :-

thestandard.nz

Some of you are probably aware that since late 2014, it was possible to get direct .nz addresses. In our case what I wanted for the site was either standard.nz or better still thestandard.nz.

The problem was that IDG Communications has owned thestandard.co.nz since 1999. They had a far better claim on domain name thestandard.nz than this site did. We only registered our URL in August 2007 when we put the site online.

So I tried for standard.nz at the end of March 2015 as the second best alternative but missed out. Someone had registered standard.co.nz and standard.nz in mid March 2015. I was rather disappointed…

embarrassed-2I even had the bright idea of looking through alternatives after a few beers on a Friday night and brought std.nz as a really really short alternative. Ah yeah right. *embarrassed grimace*

It was classic example why you should not drink and then do a foolish action. At least getting an inappropriate domain name is a whole lot less painful to correct than getting a real sexually transmitted disease. Earlier this month std.nz has now become pending release to a good home. 

Back in mid-2015 I asked IDG if we could use thestandard.nz. As we were very active and they appeared to have had a parked domain since 1999 – it would be more useful for us than for them. I even offered to pay for it if I/we could afford it. But a few weeks later, they responded very generously saying that we could have it – what did they have to do? In another cringeworthy episode, I checked the Domain Name Commission site without seeing a obvious course of action. So I made the foolish mistake of putting the email into my ToDo list. Bad mistake…

As any regular reader of this site will be aware, I’ve been a bit busy and distracted with work for the last 18 months. In fact since August last year, I only managed to start going through the old ToDo items while I was in Italy for work in the past 5 weeks.

But this time I managed to locate links and possible actions on the DNC site for the dispute resolution and sent it to IDG a couple of days ago.

IDG are now my favourite media organisation. The domain came off being conflicted Friday morning, and I purchased it that afternoon. Hopefully over the weekend you can expect that this site will start shortening its address name, while the old domain name redirects…

But when it comes to my ‘spare’ time these days, I can’t really promise that with any certainty. Think of it as a nascent possibility.

 

Oh, and the standard.nz? I think it has been banked because you can buy it. I recently asked for a price for it out of sheer curiosity about if it was being cybersquatted. I’d carefully explained our financial constraints – which didn’t make any apparent difference. I was quoted USD 35,000. Yeah right…

This site gets by on about $270 per month NZ. We operate almost entirely off small donations to run the server and the unpaid voluntary work of the authors including myself.

So at current exchange rates and the month nut for the site, we could have expect to have finished paying off that domain name in about 15 years – if we stopped running our servers for that long. 

 

 

15 comments on “A big thank you to IDG from thestandard.nz ”

  • Comments are now closed

  2. Bill 2
    16 April 2016 at 12:08 pm

    Y’know…std.nz would never be forgotten by anyone. Just saying like.

    std.nz – a pox on the establishment since 2007 😉

    • r0b 2.1
      16 April 2016 at 12:16 pm

      Hah! Like it.

    • lprent 2.2
      16 April 2016 at 12:26 pm

      Ummm sounds like a robinsod sitename

    • weka 2.3
      16 April 2016 at 12:43 pm

      lol.

      For a long time the NZ Privacy Commissioner’s office 0800 number had an answerphone message in a Canadian voice that asked people to put leave their phone number including their STD number. Eventually it got changed.

      as an aside, it does remind me of the issue of how people pronounce things they see mostly in text. I saw someone online the other day put ‘an’ in front of NZ instead of ‘a’ (as in ‘an NZ flag), which jarred until I realised that some people when they see ‘NZ’ hear enzed, whereas unless it’s a URL I hear New Zealand.

    • McFlock 2.4
      16 April 2016 at 5:28 pm

      forum for the Left, warts and all… 🙂

      • lprent 2.4.1
        16 April 2016 at 5:53 pm

        With a renewed emphasis using treatments of mercury, to allow the toxic factions to flow and merge freely.

        How did we get on to this topic?

        Ah Galbraiths on a friday. It has a lot to answer for.

  3. The Other Mike 3
    16 April 2016 at 1:45 pm

    US$35,000??? FFS. Makes ya wonder how some nebulous outfit with a fancy website and an address in the Cayman Islands gets to cybersquat .NZ domains.

    I’m gonna hoover up a few .com names and scam away!

    • hoom 3.1
      16 April 2016 at 5:23 pm

      DNC has a pretty solid dispute policy for .nz cybersquatters.

      If they can’t defend their ownership the domain can be turned over at no cost to someone with a reasonable claim.

      Props to IDG for doing the good thing 🙂

      And DNC for the Conflicted Name Process.

  4. maui 4
    16 April 2016 at 1:54 pm

    Nice work! there’s nothing more annoying than someone else having the web address you want.

    • lprent 4.1
      16 April 2016 at 2:46 pm

      IDG were great about it, especially considering that if they’d wanted to contest it, it would have been theirs.

      What else can I say… Apart from that it was the one that I wanted because the brand of the site is ‘The Standard’.

      I also thought that the least that we could do was to acknowledge their generosity.

      Drat, my cell has flipped to the site for that URL. However my workstation still has it cached. I guess that means I can put my feet up for a while rather than digging out how to flush the DNS cache or add it temporarily to the hosts file.

      Lazy Saturday..

  5. Colonial Viper 5
    16 April 2016 at 2:50 pm

    Thanks IDG. And Lprent. You guys are great.