Aristotle

That’s a reasonable suggestion, but also feels like it’s missing the point in a way.

My sense is that whoever ran the site lost interest in keeping it online, and the registration lapsing was just a symptom of that. Moving the registration to TPF would have addressed the symptom but not the real problem, which would be that there was not enough interest to even hand off the site to someone else properly (which I can understand – it takes care and effort, at a time when you can least be bothered).

Now the site does appear to have been operational right up to the point that the domain lapsed, so maybe if the domain had been transferred to TPF it would still be around and coasting along without anyone at the helm. That would be a better situation than we have now – certainly.

But the deeper problem remains the question of how the site stays up if no one cares to keep it up.

(Blogs.perl.org itself is up only because I stepped up and offered to take it over when the suggestion to mothball it was floated, and I suspect that that only worked out as it did because I had long been involved in running it already. Even so, I took up some of Dave’s and Aaron’s time in order to get up to speed with the maintenance I hadn’t previously performed.)

The domain registration is one thing – that’s easy. But the Perl NOC guys don’t have the bandwidth to keep online a zoo of systems built in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people over time. The CPAN RT very nearly got shut down! Even the MetaCPAN crew, running a single site, is suffering the same issue.

Still, transferring a domain to TPF is at least something.