Kaskus.Us Domain Ownership Changes Hands?

The “.us” domain of Indonesia’s biggest online forum Kaskus is no longer owned by the website’s company, PT. Darta Media Indonesia. Instead Kaskus’ main domain of 12 years is now owned by an organization called Crunchy Gulp Media, a company that seems to have hardly existed before this incident. If users today try to access Kaskus through the Kaskus.us domain, the address will be redirected to another Indonesian online forum Selapa.com. This now leaves Kaskus with only its recently changed domains, which are Kaskus.co.id and Kaskus.com

Interestingly, Kaskus has not made any official explanation regarding this issue. And when I tried searching for the word “Selapa” on Kaskus, it automatically changed into “Kaskus” as the search keyword. When we asked Kaskus about Selapa, Tia Ballan, the partner relations representative of Kaskus said that the company has no affiliation with Selapa. We were not able to draw any more comment on the matter.

Through sheer curiosity, then I checked out the Selapa website to gain more info amidst all this confusion. A similar thing happened here, when I tried to use the search keyword of “kaskus,” it could not be searched for some reason because it belongs to a wildcard keyword. A lot of Selapa users were also wondering and asking questions about this issue on the Selapa forum, but none of the four English-speaking moderators made any clarifications on that matter. Funnily enough though, one of the Selapa members used the username Andrew.Darwis (which is the co-founder of Kaskus) in the forum.

Ngetik.com speculates that Kaskus might have forgotten to extend the domain ownership, which then allowed the domain name to be put on backorder or on an auction list. Selapa could have then picked it up, although it’s hard to prove definitively that they did.

Kaskus is huge in Indonesia, as big as Facebook even. So owning one of its domain names is definitely a powerful traffic generating tool to have. Surely enough, a lot of Selapa members came to the website because they wanted to go Kaskus.us as discussed in the Selapa forum. However, its domain name potency won’t last too long it seems. According to Alexa, the website domain’s popularity has dramatically decreased by 82 percent only in the last month.

As we said before, we can’t be sure if the domain was actually taken by Selapa or not. But for whoever snagged the name, it may be technically legal, but it certainly lacks class. Will Kaskus appeal this in court? Can they? Let’s wait and see.

Kaskus’ attention at the moment however, seemed fixed on revamping its new website look called Kaskus Beta Live. The new look is available since the end of June for invited users. Here are the old and new website look:

[Picture source: wartakamu.com]