You may have been one of the many who read my post earlier this week on the issue of my personal domain name, sarahcarroll.ie, which our good friends over at register365 managed to retrieve for me after they had allowed it to be assigned to another Sarah Carroll (an actress who just happens to have the same name as me, but shares little else and who can be found at www.sarahcarroll.org now). If so, here’s the follow up, and a little follow up from the credit card number issue as well.
I promise that normal service will resume shortly, and this blog will not degenerate into a H365 bashing rant – it’s not my intention at all. But I have to say I’ve had some truly interesting conversations as a result of these few posts, and some conversations that really were not worth having…
So – on Paddy’s weekend I was sitting watching telly with the laptop keeping me company as I set off to point my personal domain name (sarahcarroll.ie in case you hadn’t noticed) to this blog – to at least do something with it. See my last post on the subject for the details, but I discovered that the domain was being occupied by another Sarah Carroll. After a 30 minute live chat session, Marek retrieved it from the other Sarah Carroll’s hosting account. So far so good.
Last Thursday, my mobile rang and a well modulated voice introduced herself as Sarah Carroll. This is the young woman who had been using my domain name. She explained how she had registered it through Register365 on the 1st of November last year and then had opened a hosting account and had the domain name assigned to it. Unfortunately, she registered it an hour or two after I did, so the IEDR processed my application first and I became the owner of it. The other Sarah Carroll never received a confirmation that she owned it, and Register365 didn’t think to question it.
As she is an actress (funny that, I was one of them once – thankfully for her she didn’t have to change her name to get her Equity card, as I gave mine back in 1988 at the same time as I resigned from the Executive of Irish Actors Equity when I finally decided to have a real life…) she had given out the web address sarahcarroll.ie and the email: sarah_at_sarahcarroll.ie in thousands of resumes. She wanted to know if she could buy the domain off me, but unfortunately I wasn’t intending to sell it. Her biggest problem was that e-mails were now bouncing, which at least I could do something about, so I set up an autoresponder, letting people know what email address they could contact her at. So good so far… still sitting comfortably?
So far, we have register365 wasting a little bit of my time, but doing a fair bit of damage to the poor kid who takes her career very seriously. So seriously that she rang me again yesterday to ask me to remove the blog post where I outlined what had happened. She had a couple of good points, if you googled the web designers name, the post came up and it was a bit unfair to her as the incompetence was on Register365’s part, not hers. And she felt that the post showed her in a bad light as it looked like she had deliberately hijacked the domain name. I told her I’d do something with it this weekend – when I had time. I’m not going to go into the details of the email she then sent me today (tempting as it is to do the Cattey Kathy Bates – I’m older and I got more insurance – thing), as really, she is the victim in all this, and I hope that she gets some compensation of some sort from Hosting365.
Final word on the subject: Register365 ought not to assign a domain name to any account without confirmation that comes from the e-mail address of the registered owner that this assignation is done at their behest.
So now, instead of having a Friday evening, I’m editing my other post and writing this one. While I’m at it, I’ll update the credit card number issue (this at the request of a number of regular readers who are desperately waiting for the next installment). Well, you’ll know that as I registered or updated a domain name in Register365 they were capturing credit card details and storing them in my profile in their “uber” (which, in case you don’t know German means really high up and best) control panel. So it wasn’t possible to use the stored profiles to pay for renewing a domain name or to delete them. Particularly not possible to delete the multiple versions of the same card that were all stored in the system. And all stored without my permission.
The next time I went to renew a .ie (have almost moved the .coms out of there – working on it!) they wanted me to pay by credit or debit card. I wrote to them and asked them to invoice me so I could do an EFT. They responded that they’d prefer to have a card payment. I told them I wasn’t going to put my card details in to their system again. They replied (and the writing looked suspiciously like Stephens although he didn’t identify himself) that their system was really safe. That the terms and conditions clearly stated that the card details would be retained and that they were registered with the data protection commissioner and I could delete the payment profile at any time. eh, ya wha?
Go back to the live chat and see how it went, lads. All the answers are there, and the number of pings from your intranet means that at least someone in there is looking at it. But it’s a conversation I’m not having again – I’m just movin’ on.
Sarah Says 
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