The Thanet Canute is a person (or group of people) that seem to have a problem with variety. This is the story of The Thanet Canute and the cybersquatting.
Today is say no to bullies day. They say that in order to rob a bully of their power you must be brave enough to bring what they are doing into the light. Bullys thrive when they can make you feel too ashamed to admit what you have experienced.
For me, the feeling of “airing one’s laundry in public” has always felt shameful. However, in the interests of honesty here are some smalls flapping freely in the wind.
It is time to publically admit that we have been the victim of a bully.
The best choice of domain name
A domain name, like example.com, is something you need to register if you want to run a website. Generally, names are registered on a first come first served basis. If you happen to be a downright nasty person, this can be abused.
Domain squatting, which is also known as cybersquatting, is the act of registering a domain name with the purpose of getting a monetary benefit from the trademark belonging to someone else. ICANN define it as “bad faith registration of another’s trademark in a domain name”.
Once upon a time, Thanet Creative was called Thanet Creative Writers. Our writing group still is. It would make sense, therefore, for us to register thanetcreativewriters.com or maybe thanetcreativewriters.co.uk.
We could not do that because The Thanet Canute got there first.
The image to your right is the WHOIS record for the domain name. As you can see, when it was registered some porky-pies were told.
thanetcreativewriters.com redirects to thanetwriters.com
This name has been registered by someone. That someone has claimed that they are Thanet Creative and they live in Cecil Square, Margate. they even went so far as to create an email address to match.
However, if you type thanetcreativewriters.com into your address bar, you do not end up on our website. You end up at ThanetWriters.com.
You can see the redirect path as shown by this public online tool.
Thanet Writers are a group we try not to talk about. You can now maybe see why there are some hard feelings there. Generally, if there is nothing nice to say we are better off saying nothing at all.
Now, before someone tries to accuse me of starting something, I’m not saying that this Thanet Writers group are responsible for the bad faith registration. Just that they are the ones that benefit. Which I have shown.
Do the right thing
Rather than end this post on a down note, I’d like to end with something positive. The Thanet Canute has not stopped Thanet Creative having a nice website. They have just shown they are petty and have too much time and money on their hands.
I’d like to close this out by calling on Thanet Writers to join us in taking a stand against this form of cyberbullying. I would like to think that Thanet Writers would hate to benefit from the victimisation of others.