GRAND LEDGE - Some Grand Ledge parents were shocked recently when they logged on to a Web site that had belonged to the Grand Ledge Area Youth Football league and discovered pornographic photos of naked men and women.
GLAYF is devoted to football and cheerleading for fourth- through eighth-grade boys and girls.
The group's Web site had been popular during its nearly five-year existence, racking up from 6,000 to 15,000 hits a month.
Lee Ackerson, the group's president, said he received more than 80 calls from upset parents wanting to know what was going on.
"We were flabbergasted," he said.
The switch from youth football to hard-core pornography, however, was perfectly legal.
It began when the football league's domain registration for the site came up for renewal and a wrong name was listed as a contact.
An official at Network Solutions, the company that originally registered the domain name, said it could happen to anybody.
"If we don't have the right contact information, there's not a lot we can do," said Vice President Michele Krisanda.
GLAYF coach Frank Cugini said he thought the original domain name had been reserved for 10 years when he took over as webmaster about three years ago. It didn't occur to him to check the renewal date.
Because no one from the football organization could be reached to renew the site, it went up for sale and was legally bought earlier this year by Igor Vladimirovich Sumkin of Moscow.
An "under construction" message appeared on the site until early June when football sign-ups were about to begin, GLAYF officials said.
They thought it was just a glitch in the system. Then the site began displaying free pornography, and GLAYF officials began getting calls from upset parents.
Grand Ledge parent Nici Arnold, whose son plays in the league, logged on to the old site recently to see what the fuss was about.
She said she cried out when the pictures started appearing.
Instead of the familiar coaching lineup and playing-field maps she had expected to find, Arnold was shocked by the sight of hard-core pornography.
Although she tried to close out of the site, it kept popping back up with more naked bodies after she thought she had ended the program.
GLAYF officials said ultimately they decided to create a new site,
www.glayf.com, for their organization.
On Friday, a few days after an e-mailed inquiry to Sumkin by the Lansing State Journal, the league's former Web site no longer contained pornography.
On the same day, someone replying to that inquiry sent a reporter an e-mail saying he had sold the domain name in a mass sale.
"Sorry for the inconveniences," he wrote.
It's important that customers keep their contact information up to date to prevent this type of situation from happening, Krisanda said.
Her company has registered a total of 7.5 million domain names, she said. When a site's renewal date approaches, the company begins notifying owners as early as 330 days before the expiration date.
"Before we delete the site, we deactivate it so customers notice something's wrong and have an opportunity to get it back up," Krisanda said.
The company also has an optional automatic renewal service, she said, and has recently launched a 100-year domain service.
