Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Who's the Grinch?

Diabolical tactics, it seems, are not the sole preserve of northern presidents. Webmasters across the land, lock up your domain names. The Grinch is coming!

South Australian chess personality and organiser, Alex Saint, made the stunning announcement the other day on the chesschat.org site (Australia's most popular and lively chess bulletin board):

The South Australian Junior Chess League (SAJCL) has had the website www.sajcl.org for about 3 years. Earlier this year, we had a switch of webmaster and for a short while the website was closed down. We did not realise this. During this time, Chess World came along and grabbed it (the domain name). Yes we should have been more on the ball but I am quite annoyed.

In a phone call with David [Cordover], I was shocked to hear how he "wanted to teach us a lesson about professionalism". He also "wanted more bargaining power".

Out of frustration, Mr Saint also included a copy of David Cordover's email in which he stated his terms. These were, "$50 for 2 years lease on domain name", "$35 per month hosting" and "some small admin fees..."

Of course there is nothing procedurally incorrect about Mr Cordover's actions. But why in the world would a business, that only recently made a $100,000 sponsorship announcement, be taking a volunteer organisation to the cleaners? And whatever happened to “Community and Commercial working together”?

Mr Cordover give back that domain!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well done for bringing this to the attention of the international chess community. Maybe some of Cordover's suppliers OS will be wary now of doing business with him.