This link showed up in my FB feed this morning.
They’ve set up a gofundme page.
What exactly is going on here?
I suppose this kills the silly right-wing claim that Snopes is funded by George Soros.
ALWAYS keep and maintain a private back-up copy of your web site! Didn’t they do that?
(Er… How many bazigabytes would that be?)
This is a bit crazy, If you control your own DNS and have a site backup, you are golden. Worst case scenario is you restore the site and repoint the DNS. Wait for propagation and you are back in business.
My wife’s company recently launched their site using an outside vendor. I made sure that the vendor had provided database backups that we move out to a different server on a daily basis, access to the code repository in GitHub that we periodically clone, and no control over the DNS to prevent hijacking or control of the SSL cert.
It looks like Snopes contracted with a business to maintain some semblance of privacy for the actual operators. whois Snopes
What this means for Snopes is that someone else actually holds control of the domain name and where it’s hosted. So while they could set up all the content on a new host somewhere they have no way to alter the snopes.com master record to point at the new host. What their argument with the existing company is is anybody’s guess.
From experience I can tell you that whois privacy services generally do NOT lock you out of modifying the DNS records. I’m not familiar with “Perfect Privacy” so maybe they do things differently but I doubt it since they’d lose pretty much all of their business to privacy providers that don’t place such restrictions.
This from the website of Perfect Privacy LLC.
http://perfectprivacy.com/how-it-works.aspx
Weird. It looks like snopes.com is sitting on a server at a hosting provider called Cogeco Peer 1, based in Canada. I wonder if Snopes’s beef is with them, or if there’s a separate development firm that holds the keys to the hosting account. Either way, seems like poor planning on the part of Snopes. Their site is a great resource. I hope they get it sorted out.
Here’s more detail:
This article makes it out to be an ugly battle between the Mikkelsons, who are divorced and apparently fighting for control of the company.
More here: Snopes is locked in a legal battle for control of its website - Poynter
Sounds like a circular firing squad.
Whomever holds the domain, whether the site-owner[s], the host, or the registrar has the option to Lock the domain to prevent stealing.
Doesn’t always work. Then again most of the domain world is wacked out and doesn’t always work. ( particularly hostage-takers, SEO, hordes of stupid TLDs, and GoDaddy’s rather extortionate prices for desires domains [ Not GoDaddy, but the instant you run a search for the perfect name you’ve dreamed up, bots will snatch it up for a month in order to bargain with you for the price they now want ] ).
I doubt if the Snopes site weighs as much as 5 GB.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I hope the site can continue on exactly as it always has, regardless of the Mikkelson’s personal issues.
I’d hate to see it end up in the wrong hands and go the way of places like Jump The Shark.
Or worse, get bought over by Breitbart.
And is is sad that such a long and friendly relationship should shatter after so many harmonious years.
From that Poynter link:
The relationship between the two companies stretches back to the fall of 2015, when Bardav founder David Mikkelson inked a deal with Proper Media to manage all content and advertising accounts for Snopes
Good luck explaining that to former spouses.
I rate the email that the OP received, “Partially true.”
By the way, it sounds from the complaint as though Barbara Mikkelson sold her half share of ownership of the site to Proper Media some time ago and is not part of the current dispute. Proper Media also accuses David Mikkelson of spending company money on his honeymoon with his new wife. In other words, assuming the complaint accurately describes the ownership transactions, this is definitely a fight between owners of the site over their duties toward each other, and not just a dispute with a vendor.
Another article.
Snopes got a re-design a while back. I liked the old bare-bones look. Kinda lost interest.
Same here, modernist flat is hideous crap — I drop any site that’s gone flat bad.
As to the dispute mentioned by Tom Tildrum, there is a deeper message: Never divide shares 50 - 50 without a casting vote.
So you’d give up on a website for form rather than content? That’s really disheartening. It’s not like it’s hard to read or anything. And you will not find any other fact-finding website. Plus the design was flat before.
This is whole thing is ridiculous. The other side’s argument sounds ridiculous. “He’s mismanaged the site!” So? That doesn’t give you legal rights to not pay him, and he has 50% of the company, so you can’t get rid of him.
And no one is going to use the site if Snopes himself isn’t there. It’s completely useless without him in charge. It will easily spread that Snopes had a hostile takeover and cannot be trusted anymore.
These guys are morons to try and attack an Internet darling like this. If they somehow have the law on their side, it still will result in bad things for them.
I hope Leonard French is on top of this and can tell us more.
They smell money, and are assholes.
To be clear; I didn’t receive an email. I follow Snopes on Facebook.
Yes. Aesthetic matters. I wouldn’t read the most important content if it was scrawled on a wall in a revolting public lavatory
Aesthetic matters.
But not Flat Style.
If you allow pompous designers to make every site indistinguishable in it’s bare flatitude, you are complicit in their sovietism.
It’s like destroying all the world’s furniture and substituting universal IKEA. Only not using bad sites improves the Web.
I’m not sure that’s true. Did you even notice that half of Snopes left the site a year ago?