It has been a long and arduous task to get this site back up and going. A lot of it painful, and not something I particularly want to re-live, but I feel I do owe some explanations to anyone who might feel slighted.
The long and short of it is that I lost the old url through a comedy of errors and mishaps.
Firstly, I bought the url originally near on twenty years ago, and the business that I purchased the domain name off of in the first place is no longer in business. They actually haven’t been for more than a decade; however, they did have a site set up for exactly what I was doing – renewing domain names or accessing DNS information.
So here’s what happened – that business has a credit card on file for me for automatic annual renewal – and it has always updated without fail. The problem is that the card had been on file so long, that it passed the expiration date that was on file for the card. That caused the automatic renewal to fail. Compounding the issue was the fact that I got a receipt for payment that said nothing about a problem with the expiration date on the card, and leading me to believe it had renewed as it should. Well it turns out that it didn’t actually take the payment – because of the expiry date issue – and they suspended the url. By the time that I knew there was a problem, the site was already down.
Compounding the issue was the fact that all of my contact information was through my 18-year long standing email account that no longer existed. Further compounding things? I couldn’t get a hold of the former business to find out any way to keep the url from slipping from my grasp.
So that’s exactly what happened. I lost the domain name to administration and someone else bought it before I even had the opportunity to do so. That person is even trying to sell the domain name and stole my exclusive Hogs content for their landing page.
So, rather than be held ransom for a king’s fee, I decided to buy www.the-hogs.net and re-build the site.
And since you’re reading this, I managed to do so!!
In the true spirit of our franchise, I made a name change! Yeah, yeah I know… it looks a bit weird with the dash in it, but I wanted to keep things as close to original as I could. At least I didn’t call it fansofthewashingtonfootballteam.net or something crazy like that!
Due to the massive amount of old files, scripts and databases to be resurrected, there may be a lot of poltergeists on the website. If you find any, please let me know. I am doing my best to remove all of them, but there is a lot of history here – for Redskins fans to enjoy, sorry, for Washington Football Team fans to enjoy. And yeah, you will still find the name “Redskins” in places. It has nothing to do with workload – the history of the site is staying exactly as it shook out at the time. I respect people’s beliefs on the name change regardless of what they might be, but for me, I owe it to the original patrons of the site to try and keep things as uncensored as they have always been.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Our Facebook page never closed, and for now, please let me know there if you encounter any issues. I look forward to digging in more and trying to get things going again. Feel free to reach out to me. Even if it is just to say Hi.
Hail. THN is back.