Sites In Inappropriate TLDs
All too often, nonprofits turn their noses at their logical place in the namespace, like .org or .org.uk, and go for inappropriate .com domains instead. Less often, but even sillier, commercial outfits use .org domains. This section shines its spotlight on some examples of such idiocy.
The Journal of Theoretics advertises in the International Mensa Journal as "an international nonprofit science journal", but still has its site in a .com address... dumb, dumb, dumb!!! (Once again, "dumb" here is referring to the act of choosing that domain, not the people involved in that publication!)
The Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL) proclaims itself to be "strictly a nonprofit organization," and it is dedicated to resisting abuse and misuse of the English language. It doesn't, however, seem to be taking a similar stand against the abuse and misuse of the domain name system, as it has its site at spellorg.com, a particularly bizarre choice given that the inclusion of "org" shows that they know they want a domain name that indicates that they are an organization.
A case of dumb and dumber... The Xeric Foundation, a nonprofit organization that gives grants to self-publishing alternative cartoonists, uses a .com domain for their site. That's dumb. What's dumber is that, in their ads underneath the URL, they give their email address, which is not an address in their own domain, but in (gag, vomit, retch) aol.com. So they're needlessly advertising that crappy proprietary online service and locking themselves into staying on it, when they could have given themselves a sensible email in their own domain.
The group of firefighters pictured in the famous photograph raising a flag over the World Trade Center Ruins, true heroes, established a nonprofit fund in order, in their own words, to "prevent profiteering from the picture." But even heroes do dumb things sometimes; they set up the fund's Web site at thebravestfund.com, an address that implies the sort of profiteering they're actually against. To be fair, they do own the .org version of that domain as well, but that was registered as an afterthought, months after the .com version, and the inappropriate commercial domain is still the one they cite as their address, as in the Newsweek issue commemorating the anniversary of the September 11th attack.
A Blue Cross / Blue Shield affiliate, Excellus, refers to themselves as "a nonprofit Independent Licensee", but they use a .com address. They earn a "double Hall of Shame" place on my sites, since they're also on the Dan's Web Tips User Agent Page as one of the sites that cluelessly tells users of standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla to "upgrade" to MSIE.
The state of Florida has put its state government site at myflorida.com. This is really stupid... does the state really want people to think of it as a commercial entity? The proper address for the state site is
www.state.fl.us, which presently just redirects to that .com abomination. And now they're even putting the .com address on their license plates, in contrast to Pennsylvania, whose licence plates bear the logical .us address of the state site. (This is just one of a whole heap of silly and inconsistent domain names used by various branches of the Florida state government, spread across .com, .org, .gov, and other TLDs. There are a few agencies still using logical .us domains, like the Department of State.)
