Site owner has disappeared…

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  michelrenaud · Member · Sep 8, 2021 at 11:31 pm

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  Hi,

  The site owner of a friend’s two WordPress.com sites has disappeared without a trace. He didn’t renew one of the two domains (which happened to be to the most visited site…) and that domain was taken away by some ad-page company, but the other site still has the other domain “attached” to it.

  I’m an administrator on both sites, but I’m unable to change the domain information, so the sole remaining domain is kind of a hostage… ;)

  My idea was to salvage my friend’s two sites by creating two new sites here on WordPress.com (and having him as the owner this time around so something like this doesn’t happen again). However, I cannot reuse the domain that my friend still owns because WordPress.com says (correctly) that it is in use by another site…

  Is there any way around this, or is that domain associated with the site forever? We’ve tried to locate the site owner, who was originally hired to design the sites, but there are no answers to emails and his LinkedIn profile has had no activity in 1+ year (whereas previous to that there seemed to be regular activity), so it looks like maybe something has happened to him…

  Thanks,
  Michel

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  aleone89 · Staff · Sep 9, 2021 at 8:23 am

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  Hello Michel,

  Many thanks for reaching out and providing that information.

  I need to check a few things in order to best help you.

  He didn’t renew one of the two domains (which happened to be to the most visited site…) and that domain was taken away by some ad-page company, but the other site still has the other domain “attached” to it.

  Which is the domain that’s been purchased, and which is the domain which has been kept (or held hostage).

  Generally speaking, if the domain is not owned by yourself and another party, the other party would have control over that domain only.

  I hope this helps.

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  michelrenaud · Member · Sep 9, 2021 at 2:01 pm

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  Thanks for your reply. “mpronovost.com” was not renewed by the “site owner” who has disappeared (that’s the theory anyway) and some faceless entity grabbed it and turned it into some ad fest. That’s gone.

  “mpronovost.ca” still works and points to one of the two sites (English version; the .com was pointing to the French version of the site) here at WordPress.com. Unlike the .com, my friend owns the .ca domain, which is registered with a registrar up here in Canada.

  Since “mpronovost.ca” is currently assigned to a WordPress.com site owned by the guy who disappeared, I can’t reuse it to point to a new site that I would create with my friend as the site owner (to prevent this situation from happening again in the future).

  What I’m wondering is whether there’s a way to “unlink” “mpronovost.ca” from that other “kind of orphaned” site so it can point to a replacement site with the proper owner, or is it dead in the water? The only solution (to keep that domain) that I could otherwise see would be to host the sites elsewhere and change the DNS entries for the domain to point to the new host, but I’d rather stick to WordPress.com if that’s at all possible.

  Thanks,
  Michel

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  aleone89 · Staff · Sep 9, 2021 at 2:16 pm

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  Hello there,

  Thanks for your reply. “mpronovost.com” was not renewed by the “site owner” who has disappeared (that’s the theory anyway) and some faceless entity grabbed it and turned it into some ad fest. That’s gone.

  This looks to be the case: https://who.is/whois/mpronovost.com

  What I’m wondering is whether there’s a way to “unlink” “mpronovost.ca” from that other “kind of orphaned” site so it can point to a replacement site with the proper owner, or is it dead in the water?

  This is possible, but again, the site owner/account would need to action this.

  The only solution (to keep that domain) that I could otherwise see would be to host the sites elsewhere and change the DNS entries for the domain to point to the new host, but I’d rather stick to WordPress.com if that’s at all possible.

  If the DNS is accessible via a domain registrar or similar then this would be a valid option yes.

  I hope this helps.

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  michelrenaud · Member · Sep 9, 2021 at 8:09 pm

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  Thanks again. Hmmm yeah, as I suspected there’s nothing we can do unless we can find that guy (you know it’s bad when I’m even looking at obituaries… lol)

  Maybe it’s time for a rebranding and just have his .ca domain redirect to a new domain name.

  Thanks!
  Michel