I was visiting over at All Things Financial when in the comments it came to my attention the the original All Things Financial hosted at blogger was no longer in his possession. Someone else was using it and put up a financial site in its place. I asked JLP why he had done this and he replied he had no idea how it happened:

Actually, I don’t know how that happened. All the sudden I noticed that someone else was using my blog name. I have emailed the guy and he told me that he was going to shut his site down. I told him thanks and also told him that I would mention his new blog on my website and would even make him
Blog of the Week. I haven’t heard back from him yet. He hasn’t done it yet and that kind of bugs me.

I should say so! It would bug the hell out of me if someone took over my old site after I’d put in as much work as JLP had.

So out of a lark, I went to blogger and I tried to sign up for the domain allthingsfinancial.blogspot.com and guess what! It let me!!! Of course, I’ll turn this over to JLP immediately, but that’s a nasty little bug if anyone can overwrite your entire site by simply applying for the domain name.

It doesn’t appear that this bug is widespread. I tried it with several sites I had on blogger and I couldn’t overwrite any of them, but even if it’s only a few those bloggers are not going to be happy at all when months or years of work gets erased without warning. Anyone else know of a bug like this?

Update: Hmmm, it might have been fortuitous timing. I didn’t check the domain before I applied for the name to see if the site was still up so the other blogger may have taken it down when I applied. Had JLP try to overwrite my ownership and he couldn’t, so I deleted it and he claimed it back right away. All very strange, but the important thing is that JLP has his original site back which is how it should be…