When third-party project sites go missing.

[hamish]

The Clan Donald DNA project, like various others, is hosted on its own servers, rather than here on FTDNA.

At the moment, http://dna-project.clan-donald-usa.org/ appears to be missing. It's not that the site is unreachable; it's that all the content is gone.

Now, it's too early to panic, but as a general question, what happens if a third-party project suddenly goes AWOL? Presumably the test results of the individuals involved remain with FTDNA, but would somebody else have to set up a project and then all the members of the old project have to join the new one manually? That would be very unfortunately as it would surely lead to the loss of less active (but still willing) members.

H

[Jim Barrett]

Have you tried to contact the project admin?

[hamish]

I have emailed the project administrator, but my question is intended to be wider in scope than this particular project.

[JOlson]

The 'project' remains at FTDNA. You are still a member of the project. Your DNA test results are still intact. Any subsequent processing that was done by the previous project administrator on the remote site may be lost. Any project spcific information posted on the remote site may be lost.

If you can confirm that the absence is not temporary, then somebody needs to step forward and become the new group administrator. Then, they can at least reset the web site link to the default FTDNA-provided site that will display the group's results.

EDIT: Looks like their server is still up, but the directory got wiped out. The project administrator may be trying to recover files.

[thetick]

The web archive has copies of the website. No guarrentees and dates may be old. Just type or paste the URL at the top of http://web.archive.org

The most recent one appears to be from May 2009 http://web.archive.org/web/200905041...donald-usa.org