Please allow me to explain further. Both John and I have pulled our records and done some research on this issue. I have pulled all the listed organization web addresses from my official database of stuorg records where groups can publish their address. John has looked at our current configuration on the MU student server and it does not host any .com addresses (or other top level domains). Any student organizations that have TLDs are either hosted elsewhere or are forwarding to our server.
After checking my list of approximately 300 groups that have a website, 90 list a TLD address. We did not find any groups on our server with a TLD address. When we checked the registration information for a sample of those addresses, we found that either the groups were hosted off-site (see www.younwha.com our Tae Kwon Do club) or they had set up the redirect as we are suggesting in this case (see tigerscu.org the Tiger Credit Union Student Org).
We recognize that the time and work involved in setting up individual TLDs for virtual hosting and/or email is minimal (15 minutes or so) and could be automated to some extent.
However, due to current staffing, adding something else to the list of services we currently offer is not a possibility at the moment. Hosting a domain for one student organization is not the issue, hosting one or more domains for 500 student organizations is.
As far as the virtual hosting goes, there are only about 10 or so student organizations on our server that are hosted this way. These groups were grandfathered in when John started with us full time several years ago. John has been working with groups to get all these cases either moved off our server or to help them remove the virtual hosting aspect from their web presence. We have successfully done this for 15 groups so far and will continue to work on this until we get them all moved off our server. The only other instances of virtual hosting on our server are for MSA and Student Life of which we will always do this for.
As Johns supervisor, I can tell you that server maintenance is only a small aspect of John's job responsibilities. His primary focus is to be a programmer for MSA, not spend most of his days refining existing services for student organizations. Some within MSA have, in the past, suggested that John spend even less time doing these types of things so that he can perform even more programming on services that MSA wants to provide to the entire student body.
Having said this, ORG is committed to offering student organizations the services they need to successfully operate. If any student organization would like to contact the ORG in support of having TLDs hosted on the student server, they are free to do so. If, in the future, if there is enough of a demand, the ORG would strongly consider allocating additional funding so this service can be considered.
Once again, I want to reiterate that we are not disallowing Mizzou Forte from doing this action. We are stating that we will not do this service for the group because of our limited time and resources. We still have about 200 organizations that do not have a web site listed with us and we consider helping them create a web identity a higher priority than expanding an existing groups identity.
If we still need to discuss this matter further, I would be willing to meet next week if need be.