North Dakota – NDSUP News
A small registrar in North Dakota is advising its domainer customers to keep their domains warm, especially as winter approaches fast. North Dakota is one of the less populous states in the US, with fewer than 2 McDonald’s restaurants per square mile.
Meanwhile, North Dakota maintains a healthy number of domainer professionals; the long, cold nights in winter offer a positive environment for the proliferation of domaining as a hobby, second in the state of North Dakota only to a game of “spin the bottle” among first cousins.
Billy Rae Donaldson, CEO of Moosey Moose Domains, explained:
“Well, last winter we had some trouble with the database and whatnot, the programmer left to marry some hot girl from Mexico and never came back. Meanwhile we waited for an upgrade to the servers – and that’s when it all happened.”
Apparently, due to the loss of temperature control in the server room where the database of domains was kept, a lot of domainers complained that they started losing their domains in an odd fashion.
Not all of the domains were affected, but those that did, lost several letters from left, right or both sides – resulting in a truncated variant. The TLD itself does not get affected, thankfully.
“After some research, we realized that it was a case of “domain shrinkage”; a rare condition that leads to character loss for ASCII domains. We are not sure yet how IDN domains are affected”, said Billy Rae.
“So now we advise all domainers here in the state of North Dakota to use warmers in their accounts and keep the domains at a constant temperature of 78.5 degrees. Spikes can be dangerous to one’s domains and as an example, a fella here witnessed his ICUP.info shrink by two letters into ip.info. Amazing, ain’t it?”
Unfortunately, Afilias won’t let him transfer it, as it’s now a 2-letter .info that’s unsupported by the system. There is no way to refund a domain that has suffered shrinkage, so be careful out there with your family jewels.
A lot of people would hate to see their largeweiner.com become peepee.com 😀