A Primer: Lost related websites.

[tgs]

I will update this as things change

I read through about 5 different LOST forums, and nearly every single one of them has 10 to 15 posts about the different websites associated with LOST and its probably a good idea to delete many of the duplicate threads that are currently running.

The main sites so far have been:

http://www.thehansofoundation.org/
http://www.oceanicflight815.com/
http://www.oceanic-air.com/
http://www.fly-oceanic.com
http://www.oceanic-airlines.com

Still Disputed:
none

Non-Official Sites:
http://www.dharmaindustries.com
http://www.mrclucks.com
http://www.dharmainitiative.com/
http://www.dharmainitiative.org
http://www.dharmainitiative.info
http://www.dharmainitiative.net
http://www.driveshaftband.com
http://www.thehansofoundation.com/
http://www.thehansofoundation.net/
http://www.oceanicfligh815.net
http://www.thedharmainitiative.org
http://www.hansofoundation.net/
http://www.hansofoundation.info/
http://www.hansofoundation.com/
http://www.hansofoundation.org/
http://www.bigspaceship1.com
http://www.oceanicworldair.com

Official Sites
The official sites have the Disney Disclaimer: http://disney.go.com/corporate/privacy/pp_abc.html linked from them. This is usually the first tip that a site is a legitimate site tied to the LOST program. ABC has to cover its ***, so it will throw a disclaimer and a terms of use up on all the sites associated with it.

Secondly, they will be hosted on one of Disney's WDIG Servers (Walt Disney Internet Group) or the Seattle based Disney Worldwide Services,

Before you post, do a search
Ok so I figured I would throw together some quick links for those of you who are not uber-web savvy. These links will help you pull all of that readily available information about the site registrars and owners and where the sites are located. Everyone who "finds a new website" should run through these quick steps to determine if its something put up by fans who are getting in on the fun of LOST and its use of the web as an information dump.

1. The Whois database: http://www.whois.sc is probably one of the better sites for looking up website registration records because it pulls from most of the current domain registrars, plus it pulls in locational data from ARIN as well. You can find out where a website is hosted (locality) and how many other sites are hosted on that server all in one page. It used to be that only one company (InterNic) could register a web domain, but this has since been changed and now there are a plethora of domain registrars out there.

Typical whois data looks like this:

Domain ID106939446-LROR
Domain Name:THEHANSOFOUNDATION.ORG
Created On:18-Jul-2005 1955 UTC
Last Updated On:17-Sep-2005 04:05:12 UTC
Expiration Date:18-Jul-2007 1955 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:tu8XYzBd1Q9n6Trn
Registrant Name:ABC, Inc.
Registrant Organization:ABC, Inc.
Registrant Street1:77 West 66th Street
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10023
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.8186233200
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:wdigdomainreg@dig.com

See simple information about who the site is supposed to belong to. Now there is nothing that says that people wont put false information into their registration, technically this is illegal, but its not generally enforced unless someone is cybersquatting. Regardless, this should be your first course of action for checking out sites legitimacy.

Hopefully this will help clear up some of the “OH LOOK AT THIS WEBSITE IS IT REAL” threads that are cluttering up the boards.