Dr. Russ Buss Held Hostage and Squatted on Somewhere in the World
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 2:28PM Where is the drrussbuss.com website? We are not exactly sure. What we do know is that as of January 2, 2012 any attempt to search for and access this website only takes you to a “Go Daddy” parked page which asks whether you own a website by that name. Clicking through the prompts just brings you back to the parked page.
We were able to access the Moment-to-Moment Optimism blog through its host site Squarespace. The good news is that no content has been lost. The bad news is that all of those who know us as drrussbus.com cannot access the inspirational material they have been seeking on a regular basis.
Where in the World is DrRussBuss
The best we can tell the “Buss” is being “squatted on” in Australia. The actual hi tech term is “cybersquatting” or domain squatting which -
- “according to the United States federal law is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.”
We know for sure that a company in Australia has purchased our domain name. What they plan to do with the name is unknown. We can only hope that the “Buss” is not being abused while it is held hostage. That domain name was special to us and we wouldn’t want anything untoward to happen to the “Buss.” The “RussBuss” was a good vehicle from which to tour and explore optimism.
Unfortunately at this time we have no way of knowing when, if ever, we will be able to get the “Buss” back; at a minimum we estimate several months of concerted effort. We still have questions about how the domain name was made available to sell. And we will pursue reasonable channels to have it returned. But we know you cannot wait that long to receive your next daily dose of optimism. We know you need your “Optimism Now!”
Get Your “Optimism Now!”
This situation has certainly put our optimism stamina to the test. How do we recover from this setback within a few moments and move forward towards our goal of teaching how to live optimistically in every moment of life? If we allowed pessimism to rule the moment we would act like helpless victims and likely do one of the following:
- Spend months trying to get the domain name back while losing over two years of effort building a stable audience platform.
- Use a .org or .net domain name version of the site which we do happen to own. While this solution is not necessarily pessimistic it is not optimistic either because it does not entertain the possibility of a grand new opportunity that might be out there as a solution to the problem.
We asked ourselves: “What is the grand new opportunity inherent in this negative situation?” A possible answer came to mind immediately. We had recently purchased a new domain name that would support the new iPhone application we have developed and are about to release. The domain name is: www.OptimismNow.com. We realized that is was the perfect hosting name for the Moment-to-Moment Optimism blog and it could still support the App. Because the new domain name has the word 'optimism' in it, it will likely make it much easier for individuals to be searching the net and stumble upon it.
Bookmark www.OptimismNow.com
For easy access to your daily dose of optimism, go ahead and bookmark the site with its new domain name. Trying to access the site via the drrussbuss domain name will only take you to a dead end. Meanwhile we will be trying to rescue the “RussBuss” from its Australian captors...