SPRINGFIELD, Fla. – Every time I read about porn showing up on a domain once held by a politician, local government, school district or anything else along those lines, I shake my head and wonder. Don’t these people know how freaking cheap it is to renew a domain name?
Take the Florida city of Springfield, for example. While I understand the city’s desire to migrate to a .gov URL, what boggles my mind is the lack of foresight with respect to Florida citizens who may have bookmarked the former site. Inbound links are another concern, including those that might show up on current search engine results pages for Springfield-related searches.
“Our main website is Springfield.fl.gov, and if the citizens go to (the old site), it now goes to a porno site,” said Mayor Ralph Hammond. “We have no control over that. We’re getting accused of placing that site out there, but the city of Springfield has nothing to do with it.”
No, Mr. Hammond, the city of Springfield does have something to do with it, because this is 2017 and at this point, folks like you have no excuse for not understanding how the internet works. This includes having no excuse for failing to find anywhere between $1 and $15 in the city’s annual budget to make sure access to the city’s official website at its original location is continuous and consistent.
Now, had the original domain been a .gov (as the city’s new domain is), I might understand letting it lapse as a cost-saving measure, because .gov renewal fees are substantially higher than those for .com, .net and other general-availability TLDs. In this case, however, the old site was a .org, meaning it wasn’t subject to those higher fees.
Speaking of porn sites, over the years I’ve run several that have rebranded, for one reason or another. In every case, I’ve maintained the old domain name and simply redirected all traffic hitting that URL to the new site. Doing what I’ve just described is trivially easy for any competent person, let alone any competent webmaster.
In any event, Springfield and Hammond have now received an object lesson in how not to maintain a government website.
“It’s quite embarrassing,” Hammond said. (And he’ll get no arguments from me on that point.)
Adding porn-insult to IT-injury, Hammond said he “had one gentleman call and say, ‘I’m not voting for you anymore because you got porn on the city website.’”
While reaction is a little unfair to Hammond, my hunch is the unidentified gentleman is not alone in holding the city responsible, whether voters mistakenly believe the city is now in the business of distributing Japanese porn or think of the gaffe as a form of cyber-negligence.
Hammond said the city switched from using a .org domain to the more appropriate .gov around three years back. Per the article linked above, the city’s IT department “now is seeking to buy back the domain and any domain names similar to the city’s current Springfield.fl.gov website.”
Hopefully, the hassle and expense involved in addressing this problem retroactively will encourage Springfield to put more thought into its online presence in the future, possibly including making sure it renews all its associated domains, not just the ones it considers “current.”
Then again, one would also like to think if a politician gets caught up in, say, a sexting scandal, he will learn from it and not repeatedly end up the subject of humiliating articles about his inability to keep it in his internet-pants …. but then there’s this guy.
Quick: Somebody tie a ribbon around Hammond’s finger to remind him about this whole domain-expiration thing, lest someday we in the adult industry find ourselves having to issue DMCA take-down notices to a .gov-based tube site that appears to have some association with the Florida Panhandle…
