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Penny Mellor, MSBP Campaigner, in Domain Name Bungle Maintaining NHS Exposed is an interesting, if somewhat unusual job. In the early days, complaints, threats and attempts to have the site taken offline were an almost daily occurrence. We even had the odd offer of physical violence. Of course, we quickly learned how to deal with these things, and set up appropriate procedures to keep the site running. Such attempts are far less common these days, probably because anyone with any nouse whatsoever has figured out (correctly) that: a) it must surely have been tried before, and clearly hasn’t worked; and b) we will probably lampoon them over their miserable failure, thereby attracting yet more unwelcome attention. Even so, we still get the odd enterprising soul who hasn’t yet reached this pinnacle of intellectual reasoning and is willing to give it a shot. Most are too uninteresting to relate to our readers, but one of the more recent attempts was so unbelievably funny that we simply have to share it. Now, pay attention. What follows is not rocket science, but has apparently so confused one person that it’s worth setting out from the get go: There exists the NHS Exposed website. You get to it by typing www.nhsexposed.com into your web browser. There also exists the NHS Exposed Blog. You get to that by typing www.nhsexposedblog.blogspot.com into your web browser. These two sites are entirely separate entities that just happen to be run by the same people and deal with similar issues. The NHS Exposed website has its own domain name (nhsexposed.com), which is registered, as all domain names are, through a domain registrar (a company called Tucows, in this case). As with most websites, the material it contains is hosted on web space that is rented from another company. The host and the domain registrar are, as is usually (but not always) the case, totally separate companies. The NHS Exposed Blog does not have its own domain name. Rather, it, like millions of other blogs, is simply a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogspot allows (almost) anyone to create a free blog – you just pick a name, they create the subdomain for you, and you’re good to go. Are you following along? We have three different organisations involved in this equation; the domain registrar, the web host, and blogspot. None of them are in any way associated with any of the others. Clear? Good. Unfortunately, this wasn’t at all clear to Ms Penny Mellor. It appears that she took umbrage at something posted on the NHS Exposed Blog – I have no idea what, because I didn’t write it and her antics don’t interest me enough to find out. However, apparently frothing with righteous indignation, and determined to strike a blow for… well, something, anyway, she did a little detective work. Of course, when I say detective work, I use the term loosely – on a scale of Clouseau to Sherlock Holmes, the shamusometer is definitely in Pink Panther territory on this occasion. Completely failing to notice that the NHS Exposed Blog is not the same as the NHS Exposed website, our intrepid gumshoe eventually “discovered” that the registrar for the nhsexposed.com domain name is Tucows. Of course, this is public information, and is available to anyone, free of charge, in a matter of seconds, but her excitement at joining the millions of people who figure out how to use the incredibly simple WHOIS tool every day must have been overwhelming. Certainly, I can think of no other reason for our supersleuth to so totally fail to realise that a domain registrar has no influence on, authority over or interest in material published on the website with which the domain is associated, much less over material published on a totally different site. Such matters are simply not their business. Nonetheless, Ms Marp… ahem, Mellor, dispatched the following email to Tucows [note the following is a verbatim copy and all typos / spelling mistakes are courtesy of Ms Mellor – how many can you spot, kids?]: “A domain name registered with yourselves, NHSExposed.com, set up in the UK and owned by Dr Rita pal is presently posting libelous and malicious details about me on their website. Despite a request to Dr Pal not to do so, it continues to this day and what is being written amounts to harrassment of me. Please could you point me in the direction of whom in your company I need to contact to have these offensive and unwarranted postings removed. I have contacted my solicitors here as I am a high profile campaigner and this sort of behaviour undermines my integrity and credibility with government and other agencies currently investigating Dr David Southall. I do not wish to start any legal proceedings if this can be dealt with another way- however Dr Pal has breached certain laws here in the UK. Breached privacy laws Thank you Penny Mellor Details of website Domain Name: NHSEXPOSED.COM Registrar: TUCOWS INC Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net Referral URL: http://domainhelp.tucows.com http://nhsexposedblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Penny%20Mellor” Can you, dear reader, imagine the extent of the hilarity at Tucows when they received this missive? Here is someone (who describes herself as “a high profile campaigner” with governmental and investigative contacts, yet) complaining to them about material published on a website. Even if this was anything to do with them (which it isn’t – their business is in domain names, not in hosting the websites associated with them), the material apparently complained about isn’t on the website associated with the domain name quoted in the correspondence. Rather, it is living on a blogspot blog instead. Needless to say, the blogspot.com domain name was not registered through Tucows, so even if they had any authority to respond to this complaint, and were inclined to do so, the material complained of is entirely beyond their sphere of influence. So bizarrely, laughably misplaced is Ms Mellor’s little note that I have absolutely no doubt that it is even now pinned up in the Tucows staff canteen, taking pride of place amongst those sources of employee mirth that inevitably accumulate in any large organisation. So, Ms Mellor, MSBP campaigner and convicted felon, in this fun-packed round your score is: Observation (which website am I reading?): 0 points Of course, making merry over Penny Mellor’s monumental faux pas is all very well, but this incident also raises a very significant point. Knowing which website you’re looking at, and making a complaint about its content to the right company, is not a difficult thing to do. In contrast, I understand that paediatrics is quite a complex subject, with many nuances that need to be fully understood. In view of Ms Mellor’s total failure to grasp the former point, I can quite see how she would be concerned about her “credibility with government and other agencies currently investigating Dr David Southall”. I very much hope that this “high profile campaigner” has done a better job of understanding the complexities of her complaints against paediatrician Dr David Southall than she has of correctly identifying a website; if not, “government and other agencies” may have wasted a lot of time, effort and tax-payers’ money. Time will tell. James Landon.
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