We’re quick to praise Sound Transit when they do good things, and quick to jump on the No-to-Prop-1 people when they’re being dishonest and/or unethical. But today, we should take a moment to slap ST and praise the No campaign.
Over the weekend, somebody at ST let the domain name for soundtransit.org expire. They deserve to be criticized for this silly and stupid oversight. The No campaign, sniffing an opportunity, sent out this press release:
Accordingly, we paid $35 from campaign funds to renew the domain name on Sound Transit’s behalf, and are assured by Network Solutions, Inc., Sound Transit’s domain name registrar, that we have done everything possible to expedite recovery of Sound Transit website service.
A political stunt? Sure. But there’s certainly a lot of mischief that could have happened as a result of this embarassing mistake. If the No Campaign had had this happen to them, we would have ridiculed them. Assuming this press release is accruate, I applaud them for being relatively gracious in their return of the domain name.
UPDATE: Ben discovers that the opposition press release is, in fact, very inaccurate. That’s what I get for giving opponents the benefit of the doubt! I promise to be suspicious and cynical from now on.
Glad to see this quickly resolved. I was worried yesterday when I saw the generic search page. Now their domain will expire in 2013. Hope they still remember to renew it then.
Thanks for the note. Many of us in the opposition use Sound Transit and the website. When we noticed the website was down, we tried to notify Sound Transit. Unable to reach anyone, we did what we had to do to fix it. Easy enough. As for the political opportunity, there was none—we notified the media so that they could notify the public of alternative methods (telephone, still works) for fining route and schedule information. Experienced in website management, we knew it would be more than a few hours for the site to propagate, given how it has been set up.
This is an easy mistake to make. Microsoft itself did the same thing a few years ago.