ICANN the dictators in charge of domain name addresses nearly killed LXLE over a policy change. After 8 years of uninterrupted service ICANN suddenly wanted to 'verify' all owners of domain names. Their only form of contact was an old email address used to initially set up lxle. Since then my email address had changed and I no longer had access to the old one. On top of that I also had moved so I had no picture identification associated with my old address.

Enter the double whamming catch 22. I could neither access the old email to update whatever needed to be updated nor could I provide a proof of address from nearly 8 years ago. After four days of fighting over it I finally got it resolved by digging through a bunch of old stuff in my basement around the time of our move where I luckily stumbled upon a bill associated with my old address. After some pleading and submission of both an ID and old address documentation the account was finally 'verified'.

I was outraged simply because lots of things change in 8 years and to rip the account offline like that even though there was no attempt to transfer the domain or cancel it in anyway and even though it was being paid for every year and worked on all those years it was still ripped offline like it never existed. Serious damage has been done already as far as crawlers/indexing and the project being reported as dead. So there will likely be months of repairs ahead.

Needless to say it's back online and that's the most important part. Saved from probably the greatest internet domain heist in history. I can't imagine how many sites will go offline over this new 'verification' policy.