I'm looking for a good name & .com domain for a product for some time now. Just tried a new guess and the .com is available. I was quite enthusiastic about this option. Or so I thought...
It just so happens that the previous owner was a person that died from cancer couple of years ago and hosted some semi personal stuff there - judging from a quick read on web.archive.org, mostly promoted their books, but the topic of disease was present and books were somewhat related.
Apparently there was no one around them who would take care of the site and pay for the domain (or maybe there was, but they decided it was better not to). Related Facebook account is deleted, too. OTOH books are available on Amazon.
Now I don't feel like taking this domain would be the right move. Both emotionally and business wise.
Curious if you have any thoughts or maybe have seen some similar situations.
That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it from a blog would still get through to the content.
Last year I helped my best friend clean out his mom's condo after she passed away unexpectedly. Aside from a few sentimental items he kept and some things that were valuable either as gifts to the remaining family, for donations, or for or resale, the very very vast majority of the accumulated stuff went straight into the dumpster. A lifetime worth of things were cleaned out in two days and the condo was sold within a week.
Nothing in our lives is truly permanent and the only constant is change. Accepting that change is part of being human.
I recently sold a previously personal domain to a company that was going to use it for a new product. I added contractual provisions to address some of the issues that would come up, and I experimented with explicitly archiving a marker file to leave a record in web archives that the domain had changed hands, and a human being could consider treating the site as having different owners (and thus different archival permissions) before and after that point in time.
I wrote up my findings here: http://vitor.io/archival-markers and the proposed "/.well-known/archival-ownership-markers/ resource prefix" is described there along with examples.
It sucks someone died of course, but if we switched to a house analogy you wouldn't worry about preserving the former owner's claim on the house you just bought would you? Assuming like in this case you have no connection to the deceased.
Maybe I'm a bit too heartless, I dunno, but I feel like you've got no worries here at all. A domain expired, a domain was registered. They share a name solely through coincidence.
So once a friend of mine worked at a good will store sorting through donations. And they found a treasure trove of family albums. The person making the donation said that it was from a tenant of theirs who was kicked out or lost the apartment. Anyway, I took the photos and forgot about it. Then when I was digging through the storage, I found them, and decided, what the heck, I'd try to figure out who these belonged to. So I studied all the photos in the albums, and some clippings and receipts, and with a little leg work, figured out who it was, looked them up, and gave them a call, asking if they want their photos back.
They were pretty openly hostile to the inquiry. So I backed off, and threw the albums in the garbage. So, that was that. Maybe I approached the phone call wrong. Or maybe they really didn't want it, or to be bothered. You never know.
Take the time to take snapshots in whatever appropriate method to archive his site, spawn a new static site under the name of "rememberingjoebloggs.whatever" and add a banner to your own site at his old domain at the top saying that you are honouring his life by keeping the site alive at a different address.
Then go and post on Hacker News what you've done and then contact some journalists who want feel good filler content.
Just make sure the person wasn't on a sex offenders register or anything else that would be brand damaging by association.
There is no need for you to memorialize the deceased owner. In fact, I think it would be disrespectful to do so.
When my wife was dying, she explicitly asked me to permanently delete her emails. I did this with great sadness, but I did not read them out of respect for her wishes.
We're not talking about accidentally getting someone's old hard drive: this is a public-facing website, the kind of thing people generally create because they want the public to be able to read what they've written.
A good way to deal with any new-feeling emotional|social situation which happens on-line is to think about analogous situations which were real-world things long before there was any "on-line".
a) find a new domain without the attachments of this one OR
b) buy the domain and do what you want with it.
honestly, you're going to stress yourself out cause whatever you do is not going to be enough. there is a reason people leave emotion out of business.
For example, I knew someone who bought a domain (from a 3rd-party domain seller) whose more recent past had included adult content (you would never know from the name itself). After they set the website / email up, they discovered that their domain was on a lot of blacklists, and had mucho mail delivery problems. It took over 2 years to get through it all.
This doesn't sound like it would have that particular problem, but the domain's history can, in fact, haunt you. If the content it previously hosted could ever be considered as something that might be blacklisted by the big "blacklist cartels" (i.e., SpamHaus et al), be forewarned.
Of course, I have absolutely no idea if that is a good business move. On the other hand, you'd be doing a service to anyone who bookmarked that website by adding a note about the transition somewhere on the new site. I like Hard_Space's suggestion too. This is coming from seeing what happened with Ian Murdock's website. Thankfully, a copy of it is also hosted at https://ianmurdock.debian.net
The difference between the situations is that I wasn't interested in using the domain myself. Hosting the old site in a subdomain like u/Hard_Space described sounds like a good solution (I'd go for a subdomain rather than a directory, people often don't read further than the slash and it makes it feel like one site, while a subdomain is at the front and feels more like a separate part, especially when given a descriptive name).
I think, better to register/buy other domain, with different name.
If you have much money, also could for convenience of customers, make dedicated site with old name, where write on very beginning of main page something like "this site dedicated to memory of good person, but if you looking for ...co, redirect here (link)", but this is terrible solution, considering people could enter to buy something and they will first see negative information. But for some things this is not so important.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page
archiveteam@archiveteam.org or IRC at the channel #archiveteam (on hackint)
For a couple years I kept getting 404 errors in the site logs for pages dedicated to WWF/WWE wrestling stars ...even after moving hosting companies
I'd register the domain, use it for what you want, and ignore whatever may have been there before
From a SEO perspective, you should be fine as long as it wasn't previously a malicious or spammy site.
From ethical/emotional well that's your decision. Personally I'd be fine with it
I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example:
https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...
An alternative might be to delete history only when someone fills in a form claiming to own some copyright. BUT ... what about the situation in which your web server is temporarily taken over by a hacker and the hacked contents gets archived before you can restore the web site? In that situation it would perhaps seem reasonable for the owner of the domain to get the bogus content removed from the archive even without owning any copyright.
