David Matthewman
The owner of the bi.org domain is going to put it on the market on 13 March 2015. While it may then take several months for the sale to go through, I am going to work on the basis that any time we get after that is a bonus, and act as though the domain will be gone on that date.
I will be spending the next month managing, as best I can, the transition away from the domain. Much of bi.org is historical, and there are only a few sections that are still actively used; nonetheless, the loss of the domain will clearly involve work for some people, and I'll help with that as best I can (see contact details below).
A number of people have 'name@bi.org' e-mail aliases set up. All of these are redirects; bi.org does not provide e-mail storage or IMAP/POP accounts for anyone. These e-mail redirects will simply cease to work when the domain is transferred. Note that whoever buys the domain will be completely at liberty to set up new redirects on that address, so if you have one of these e-mail addresses, make sure that nothing personal (like, for example, password reminders) are set to deliver to them.
If you would like me to immediately mark those e-mail aliases with a message saying that the e-mail address is going away, please let me know and I will set one up.
I'm not proposing to offer any alternative e-mail aliases, because there doesn't seem to be any point. Please feel free to contact me (see below) if in fact I can do anything useful with redirects.
There are several majordomo e-mail lists run from bi.org. These will stop working when the domain is transferred. Again, it would be possible for whoever buys the domain to make the aliases point somewhere completely different, so to avoid someone accidentally posting sensitive information to a third party. I am proposing to close down the lists by 13 March.
The lists are an administrative overhead for me, and I would prefer not to continue to host them. If the list owners can't find an alternative arrangement, I will set up majordomo lists on my personal tocotox.org domain, but given that the lists will need to be re-set-up anyway, I would prefer it to be done on a totally different system.
The majority of the bi.org web sites are hosted on my Bytemark server, which is a server that I will continue to run for the foreseeable future. Their URLs will stop working once the domain is transferred - obviously, whoever buys the domain will be free to point the URL somewhere completely different.
However, becasue I hold complete copies of the sites, I will archive copies of them under a bi.tocotox.org hierarchy, and will set up redirects so that search engines index the new pages before the doamin is transferred. These will be archives only; I will honour requests from people to have existing content removed (as I have done over the past ten years), but I will not add new material.
Any people who admin/own any of those sites may request a copy of them, which I will provide to the best of my ability (some rely on PHP includes which may be fiddly to copy).
There are a few bi.org web sites that are hosted on other servers. Their URLs will stop working once the domain is transferred - again, whoever buys the domain will be free to point the URL somewhere completely different. I will help whoever owns these domains where I can, but there is a limit to what I can do with a domain that's not on a server I run.
If you want to contact me about any aspect of migrating your stuff from bi.org, please e-mail me at david@bi.org (this address is obviosuly only valid to 13 March). Please do not e-mail me about the sale of the domain itself; I do not own it, and have no part in its sale.