About this site

In 2009 this domain ran a working question-and-answer site about domain names, on Stack Exchange software, back when you could just have one of those. People asked about transfers, UDRP disputes, drop-catching, and whether a business was allowed to use a .org. The last question came in 2011. The last person logged in in 2013. Then it sat for fourteen years.

What was left was 846 HTML files. A photocopy of a website. Every page loaded. Every page was slightly wrong.

What was actually in there

I went through all 846. 183 were real questions. 258 were single answers that the old software had given their own page, cut off from whatever they were answering. 49 had the title Model.Title, which is what a template prints when nobody fills it in. 15 were blank. The rest were odds and ends.

Every one of those pages told search engines it was question 261. Every one had an empty title. Ask for a page that did not exist and the site handed you the front page and called it a success. The only tracker on it pointed at a company that had gone away.

What I did about it

There were two sources worth having. Stack Exchange published the database in 2010, which covers the first 296 posts properly, with real dates and the link between each answer and its question. Everything after that existed only in the HTML, so I pulled it out of the markup. Then I merged the two and kept the better half of every disagreement.

That came to 183 questions, 225 answers and 21 comments. Nine email addresses fell out along the way, one of them a real person's work address that had been sitting on the open web since 2010. Those are gone.

Now each question is its own page at its own address with its own title, and the wrong addresses point at the right ones. That is unglamorous and it is most of the reason I bothered.

The number on each question

It is two figures added together. The first is what the old software counted between 2009 and 2011. It was written down once and is never recalculated. The second is the count since this reopened, fetched by your browser and added on top. So the historical half is a decade-old number from a database that stopped running, and I would rather say that plainly than quietly present it as today's traffic.

Answers with no question

There are 105 answers here whose questions had already been deleted before the old site was saved. They live under /archive/, marked noindex and left out of the sitemap, because an answer with nothing to answer has no business competing in search results. I kept them because this is the only copy left.

Asking something

No accounts, no logins, no email address. Anyone can ask a question or leave a comment. I read every one before it goes up, so nothing appears the second you press the button.

What the old site had and this one does not: reputation scores, badges, bounties, and questions that any user with enough points could rewrite. None of that survived and none of it is coming back. Corrections get made by me, in public, and the change stays in the history.

Who runs it

One person. The address is on the contact page.