National Novel Writing Month Derailed By EarthLink

Chris Baty of National Novel Writing Month writes:

Hey there! We are sad to report that EarthLink, one of the world’s largest ISPs, is refusing to fix an internal error that makes the NaNoWriMo.org site inaccessible to its customers. We’ve contacted the company about the problem repeatedly with no success. And we now ask for your help in getting the issue resolved. Russ has put together an overview, which I’ve pasted below. If you have a moment today, please contact EarthLink and ask the people there, in the kindest way possible, to take the simple steps necessary to allow their customers to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. Together, we’ll get it taken care of!

[From Russ...]

Here’s the problem: EarthLink’s DNS servers are returning an incorrect NS record for NaNoWriMo.org.

They have been doing this since September 14th.

The problem seems to have been fixed once or twice, only to break again. Sometimes the incorrect record is always returned, sometimes EarthLink alternates between correct and incorrect information.

The result of this is that most of the time EarthLink subscribers cannot access the NaNoWriMo Web site.

This problem extends to subscribers of other EarthLink companies like PeoplePC and MindSpring.

Many Wrimos have spent many hours of their time with the people at EarthLink Tech Support trying to get them to fix this problem. In some cases, EarthLink staff has agreed that there is a problem, and promised to have EarthLink technicians fix it. In some cases, EarthLink staff has blamed the victims, telling them their computers were at fault. In some cases, EarthLink staff has blamed NaNoWriMo, claiming that we are purposefully blocking EarthLink subscribers from our site (which we couldn’t do even if we wanted to).

In no cases has EarthLink actually fixed the problem.

We’re asking you, the general NaNoWriMo community, to give your EarthLink-bound brethren a hand by asking EarthLink - politely! - to fix this problem.

Here are some EarthLink tech support e-mail addresses that you can try:

hostmaster@earthlink.net
webmaster@earthlink.net
abuse@earthlink.net
epasupport@earthlink.net

You can also try to e-mail, live chat, and phone links on this page.

In order to support your case, you should include the following technical information in your communication:

Here are the correct nameservers for nanowrimo.org:

% dig ns nanowrimo.org
 ns1.quickserve.com.
 ns0000.ns0.com.

Here are the incorrect nameservers that Earthlink is returning:

% dig ns nanowrimo.org @ns3.earthlink.net
 PARK10.SECURESERVER.NET.
 PARK9.SECURESERVER.NET.

We’ve checked all of the root servers for the .org TLD and none of them are wrong.

Finally, if you know someone who is having this problem, please ask them to e-mail help@nanowrimo.org. We’ll send them instructions to a
workaround for this issue.

Thank you!

[tags]national novel writing month,earthlink,nanowrimo,peoplepc,mindspring[/tags]