Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

79 points by fprct 4 years ago | 50 comments

Strange (or maybe not so strange?) thing happened.

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.

Hard_Space 4 years ago |

If you feel conflicted, you could host the original pages in a dedicated directory with a no-index header, and set up a permanent 301 redirect for those pages..? If they end up listed with your own results, it's trivial to get Google to remove them via Search Console (I do this occasionally for my pure HTML website, which has no Google Analytics etc. on it).

That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it from a blog would still get through to the content.

ggm 4 years ago | |

I think this is a very clever and kind response to the problem.

inportb 4 years ago | |

That's a good idea. Or, since it's already archived, redirect to the archived copy.

Hard_Space 4 years ago | | |

Yes, that's probably a better solution.

peckrob 4 years ago |

To me it's analogous to buying a house. If you buy a house over a certain age, especially one that's changed hands several times, there's a pretty fair chance someone died in it. You can either stress yourself out over that and walk away, or accept that that's just part of life and move on with things.

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.

vitovito 4 years ago | |

I think the house analogy is a good one. You should buy the domain and use it, that's how they work, just like houses, but you can also be intentional about being clear that there were people there before you. Establishing redirects to archived versions of the URLs is one.

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.

corobo 4 years ago |

I don't think this is any concern beyond natural intrigue. The internet comes and goes.

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.

jonnycomputer 4 years ago |

I think it doesn't matter. At the same time...

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.

pacifika 4 years ago |

Maybe add a banner to point to the web archive of the previous site? Life moves on and domains are ultimately rented much like our time here. Having a new business doesn’t stop you from honouring that, in my view.

richliss 4 years ago | |

This could be a win-win.

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.

gdcbe 4 years ago | |

Personally I would add the mention as a comment section in the HTML Source. It gives attribute without it really impacting your site's content. The same way as I treat credits where credits are due but aren't really directly related to the product built.

mcv 4 years ago | |

Pointing to the original content on web.archive.org is a really nice idea. That keeps the original content accessible and gives people the opportunity to remember the deceased person.

fprct 4 years ago | |

Yes, some way of remembrance somewhere came to my mind. But ultimately it felt somewhat intrusive to me and not particularly fitting the new character of the site.

pacifika 4 years ago | | |

Another option migth be to explain the history of the domain as part of the About page, if that suits better?

toyg 4 years ago |

I mean, at some point surely the host will take it down anyway, once the registration expires. At which point it will likely be squatted on, automatically. At least you'd be making productive use of this little patch of web land.

elefantastisch 4 years ago | |

Just want to emphasize this. If you don't buy it, it's just going to end up hosting some form of spam. May as well put it to good use. That seems like a much more respectful transition.

herodotus 4 years ago |

I do not see a problem with you taking over the domain. The respectful thing to do is to permanently erase the previous owners files without reading them.

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.

jefftk 4 years ago | |

> The respectful thing to do is to permanently erase the previous owners files without reading them.

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.

13of40 4 years ago | | |

It's not even that. When you buy a domain, it's not like you get control of the content it used to point to as well. There's nothing for OP to delete.

herodotus 4 years ago | | |

Thanks for pointing this out: I got the mistaken impression that the OP had access to the previous owners files.

bell-cot 4 years ago |

I just helped a deceased friend's family clear out his house and sell it, sell his book and music collections, sell his car, etc., etc. If his one-man small business had a retail store which he'd owned, we'd have sold that off, too.

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".

tartakovsky 4 years ago | |

What does “good” mean here? This is just one general way to arrive at an answer that doesn’t require much thinking. Who knows if it’s the best even if it is the one that requires the least thought. The past is not always a reliable moral compass model for judgement calls.

elpakal 4 years ago |

I have a side project named CaseYak and for the first year of it we were forced to use thecaseyak.com because caseyak.com was taken. We looked into the whois record for caseyak.com at the time, and it turned out it was owned by someone named Stephen Casey… who lived in Alaska (AK). So it was casey ak dot com (lol). Not sure what happened to Mr. Casey but the domain just opened up this year.

cruano 4 years ago | |

He moved

elpakal 4 years ago | | |

below ground

thrownaway561 4 years ago |

You're going down a rabbit hole of emotions and stress you don't need in your life. Either

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.

creeble 4 years ago |

The past use of a domain can haunt you for a while, depending on what that past use was.

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.

Srikanth 4 years ago |

If it is a good name, I think it is only a matter of time before someone gets it. You might as well, if you like the name.

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

wiseowise 4 years ago |

Buy it and preserve memory. At least you're conscious of the person, someone else won't be.

Aachen 4 years ago |

I've got a domain where the previous owners just let it expire while it still had useful information on it. My solution was to 301 redirect requests to the Internet Archive so that any links continue to work for a while, while also making it obvious that the site is gone. I won't be paying for this indefinitely though, the information isn't that vital and people should learn of the archive. Hopefully this helped them do that.

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).

simne 4 years ago |

This is timebomb. Information saved in search engines, etc, any time could appear again, and will look hugely contradict with current site activity.

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.

tpoacher 4 years ago |

One thing I have seen done in such cases is simply to have a discreet note somewhere on the main page like "Note: Prior to 2022, this domain was used by a different individual. If you've come here looking for the old bookwebsite.com website, which used to be owned by Bookguy, this content can be found in the webarchive at archive.com/bookwebsite" or something like that.

toomuchtodo 4 years ago |

Ask someone from ArchiveTeam to run ArchiveBot against the site, the resulting WARC will eventually make its way into the Wayback Machine. After that, feel free to use the domain for your own purposes.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

archiveteam@archiveteam.org or IRC at the channel #archiveteam (on hackint)

warrenm 4 years ago |

Many years ago I got my <firstname><lastname>.com transferred to me from the registrar that held it (it was expired, but not yet "released")

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

weird-eye-issue 4 years ago |

I saw a gardening-related site being sold for several thousand dollars by an expired domain reseller after the owner died. This happens a lot.

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

bloak 4 years ago |

I'm not suggesting you'd want to do this, but (theoretical question) is it still possible for the new owner of a domain to get web.archive.org to delete the archived data from that domain, the data created by a previous owner?

I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example:

https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...

bloak 4 years ago | |

I'm not sure why this is getting voted down. It seems relevant to me that archive.org used to believe, and perhaps still does believe, that the archived history of a domain should be under the control of the current owner of the domain.

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.

DocTomoe 4 years ago | |

Wow, that sounds like a horrible idea. It's like the new owner of an ISBN demanding libraries to burn the book previously sold under that ISBN.

qwerty456127 4 years ago | | |

Wait, do you mean an ISBN can be re-used and is not a unique identifier of a very specific book?

im3w1l 4 years ago |

I think you should reach out to his relatives and ask them for their opinion. Then you can do this with a clean conscience.