Former Lorain County Visitors Bureau website now in use by Indonesian online poker

ELYRIA — Visitors to the VisitLorainCounty website, which has for some time been the site for the Lorain County Visitors Bureau, might be surprised to learn the page now redirects to an online Indonesian poker website. Commissioner Matt Lundy brought up the issue during the commission meeting Wednesday. He said he made County Administrator Tom Williams aware back in February that the county's hold on the domain name was going to expire. By not spending $17.99, Lundy said, Lorain County lost the website that potential tourists and guests relied on to make hotel reservations or look at a calendar of events in the county. Instead, someone running an online poker website in Indonesia now is using VisitLorainCounty.com to promote that venture. "I was hoping to be able to maintain and secure that site," Lundy said Wednesday, after staff at tourist attractions in Lorain County recently contacted him to let him know about the issue. "I feel like we're left with a black eye. It's kind of embarrassing." Lundy said the web hosting service GoDaddy.com told county officials it would have cost $17.99 to renew the domain. Lundy said it wasn't much of a money issue, as the visitors bureau has more than $1 million in its account, much of it from bed taxes paid by guests who stay in Lorain County hotels. "Now if you want to visit Lorain County, you get a poker site in Indonesia," he said. "This is very upsetting. I'm quite angry about it." The situation isn't new or unique. According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which helps coordinate the assignment of names, domains and registrations of websites around the world, "cybersquatting" is the "generally bad faith registration of another's trademark in a domain name." It also is known as "domain squatting," though it appears Lorain County let its own hold on the website lapse between mid-February and this past week. Getting the site back from whoever now holds it — and who probably has no connection to Lorain County — would have meant the county shelling out $1,100 to its new owner, Commissioner Dave Moore said. "I understand Matt's concerns, but stopping it would have cost $1,100," Moore said Wednesday. "It wasn't a push-off, there were discussions and some panicking going on at the last minute." Moore said the county's visitors bureau hasn't met regularly over the last two years and that VisitLorainCounty.com was "an utter disaster for over three years" with "no traffic." He said he plans to recommend changes to the visitors bureau's makeup in the future. Lundy also said Wednesday that Williams told him the website wasn't getting many visitors, but said he was provided numbers that showed the site got 57,000 visits in 2018 and 62,000 in 2019. That number then "dropped 30 to 40 percent in 2020" — probably due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. "In 2020, a lot of places weren't open, but that's no reason to discontinue the domain," Lundy said. Williams said he had asked for but didn't have the same numbers Lundy quoted. There also was some cause behind not renewing the domain name, he and Moore said. County officials are trying to move away from having any .com extensions on county websites, preferring to go with .gov extensions on publicly owned digital properties as .com stands in for "commercial" and .gov for "government." Sites with the extension .gov are the way for the public to know that a site is a legitimate government website, Moore said. Williams also said the last time VisitLorainCounty.com was updated was in 2018, and that it is too complex to update and hard to navigate. The new administration wants to streamline that process and bring its online presence up to date, he said. "We're working with companies to improve our design, making it easier for people to go through and do updates. We have the (loraincounty).us; we don't believe a dot com is needed," he said. Moore said the county will have a more professional and interactive website as it builds a stronger network between businesses and county officials. That won't include any websites with a .com extension, he promised. Lundy said a new webpage was indeed in development, but that he believes there still needs to be a smooth transition to a new site or domain name. That's why, he said, the old one should have been kept until the new one is ready. "It's not a fair assessment to say that it was a dinosaur or no one was visiting" the website, Lundy said. "You keep the domain for a hand-off or smooth transition. … This is the time when the economy is opening up, not a time to hit a big roadblock." The visitors bureau can still be found on Facebook, though the link to VisitLorainCounty.com still was listed there as of 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com. Follow him at @daveobrienCT on Twitter.