Random Moaning

Once upon a time, back when I had such a thing as un-allocated free time, I founded a historical society. It was a good hobby for me at the time: I could write, research, publish, and network with people much better informed about the topic (the old Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo Railway) than me. It cost me a fair amount of money to get started, as this was early in the home internet boom, so most of the people who shared my interest were not yet online. This meant that to communicate with them, I had to print a dead tree edition of my publication and mail it out.

I spent several years publishing the quarterly journal, TH&B Focus, quickly moving from being primarily a writer to being primarily an editor and layout artist: I really knew a lot less about the railway than most of my subscribers and (especially) my contributors. Six years on, I'd burned out. I could no longer keep up my involvement in the publication, and I was lucky to find a team to take over the publication for me.

Even before I founded the organization, I'd been running a mailing list for the minority of folks who were online in those days. This was before Yahoo, Onelist, eGroups, and other free mailing list providers were both dependable and ubiquitous, so again, I was paying to support my hobby. Eventually, enough of the membership of the society were active online that we started publishing a web site to support the organization, at www.thbrailway.com. And things were good.

Skip ahead a few years, and the original ISP with whom we were contracting was taken over by another ISP. At some point during the change-over, one or another of the ISP's changed the contact information for our registered domain from me to their customer support department. This meant that when the domain eventually came up for renewal, the renewal information was not passed to me or to the society treasurer, and therefore we did not renew the domain.

So, of course, someone else has grabbed the domain name once it went through what the laughingly call the "redemption period", and is probably now a porn site of some sort.