A “very unfortunate” set of circumstances left a local youth soccer association scrambling to reduce its embarrassment and liability, said Kathy Stites, secretary/treasurer of the Middletown Youth Soccer Association.
When the organization didn’t renew its domain name, which expired last month, it was put up for sale by GoDaddy. Stites said GoDaddy sent several notifications to the association’s leadership, but because of miscommunication, the domain name wasn’t renewed.
So the site was sold to a Russian pornographer, she said. On Thursday afternoon, there were numerous nude photos of women and men on the site that used to list soccer tournaments in the Middletown area.
“Bad publicity” is what Stites called the situation.
She was notified recently by a board member about the pornography site, she said. She said this is the time of year when teams start signing up for tournaments. She then contacted numerous national soccer organizations that had links to the Middletown site or their web pages and told them to remove the links.
Stites said the organization contacted GoDaddy about the site, and was told the pornographer would be asked to see if he wanted to sell the domain name back.
Instead, Stites said, the organization purchased another site: www.middletownyouthsoccerohio.com. She said the site will cost $15.99 per year to renew, and the soccer association has its credit card on file so the site can be automatically renewed annually.
