The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of domain issues over the past several years.
The notorious torrent site has burnt through half a dozen domains and currently uses four different ones to avoid a single point of failure.
Today, the site’s official SuprBay forum, which is separately operated by the site’s moderators, has also run into trouble. The forum has been offline for more than a day returning incomplete DNS records.
TF hasn’t been able to reach the person in charge of the forums but domain registrar eNom informs us that the platform’s domain was suspended following an ICANN complaint.
The domain was apparently registered using inaccurate information and the owner did not respond to repeated requests to address the problem.
“This domain (pirates-forum.org) was placed on hold yesterday due to an ICANN complaint of invalid Whois contacts. We did not receive a response to our inquiries within the required 15-day period,” eNom says.
While the issue doesn’t impact the Pirate Bay site, it does make it harder for users to communicate with moderators. Among other things, the forum was frequently used to report spam and other malicious torrents.
The domain name registrar did not mention the source of the ICANN complaint, but it’s not unlikely that a copyright holder group is behind it.
SuprBay also allowed users to discuss and promote torrents but wasn’t particularly known for distributing pirated content. However, rightsholders certainly have an interest in knowing who’s operating the site.
Since the issue is limited to the domain name, it’s expected that the moderators will switch to a new one, which should resolve the problem. Alternatively, they can update their Whois information to get the original domain reinstated.
Update September 25: The domain is up and running again.
