Hey Check Out This URL

You know what's hard? Being a zoophile! (pause for audience applause and laughter). 

Seriously though, man is it ever an emotional roller coaster out here in the zoo trenches. We've been dropped and banned and kicked out from so many common internet services that we literally have a running series on it. There's so much fear and anxiety that comes intrinsically with being a zoo, not to mention the anger, frustration and disappointment that comes from seeing things that you build crumble because some CEO decided that you weren't worth the trouble to be allowed on their platform. It can really really suck. 

But, other times, things work out. And that feels really really nice. 

In case you somehow got here by magic, the name of this magazine is Zooey Dot Pub. As in, Zooey Publishing, and then a dot in the middle. This name is fun and cool, in my opinion, because it's pretty catchy, has a great acronym (Say it right now. Z - D - P. It rhymes!) and because the branding is really easy to latch onto. Zooey Dot Pub, with the URL https://zooey.pub. Boy, that sure was a fun and cool decision to make, tying in your branding to a URL. Sure hope that never comes back to bite us in the ass. 

So anyway, that came back to bite us in the ass. You see, previously we were using a company called Njalla to host the name for us. The idea was simple. You need to give a lot of information in order to "buy" a web domain, and obviously that's not something we were super interested in doing. So, instead, we paid Njalla to buy the name on our behalf, and then we just did everything else. This made sense, as Njalla is a company that literally prides itself on hosting basically anything, and is all about small projects that want to run without the risk of blowback. 

Which is why it was so shocking to us when one day our site was just offline. You can read all about it in our article So Our Domain Dropped Us, but needless to say, that was very annoying. Not only did they just kick us off their service, they actually chose to keep our domain hostage, actively not releasing it so that we couldn't scoop it back up. All of this happened almost right after renewal too, so we paid for a year of the domain, and then a year of their service, and we certainly did not get recompensated for any of that. 

Shout out to our amazing tech team for finding a quick solution. We ended up launching zooeydotpub . zdu . se, which served as a new home for the magazine after our original domain name was suddenly made unavailable to us. We also launched https://zooeydotpub.org since the other syntax is scary and also .org has better SEO. Basically, yada yada nerd shit we got the site back online. But, I can't tell you how many DM's I recieved from folks being like "Hey your new domain kinda sucks." Trust me, I KNEW. Not that I don't think the story associated with it didn't serve as a fun war time scar, but I was not exactly planning on redesigning the stickers. 

Still, everything was incredibly up in the air. Njalla owned the domain for about a full year, so all we could really do was wait, and hope they weren't so spiteful they would spend money of their own accord to keep the domain away from us. 

There was another concern as well. It's not like once the URL left Njalla, that it was necessarily going to go back to us. Legally, we never owned the domain. Instead, it was going to likely be put up for auction, with the price defined by the traffic the site got. In this specific case, the fact that they hostaged the site for so long actually worked to our advantage. We get in the tens of thousands of unique visitors per month, a site with that traffic would probably be a couple hundred dollars on the market, not even accounting for bad actors who might be willing to spend some cash to buy the domain and turn it into an anti-zoo site or something. 

So, for the past year, I've been sitting on my paws and waiting. 


And waiting.


And waiting.


And waiting.


In case you couldn't guess by now dear readers, I'm really bad at waiting. I'm not a patient racc. Espeically since I couldn't even talk to people about it since I didn't want to up the cost or give anyone else bad ideas about snatching it up. But, little by little, day by day, the date of renewal approached.

Until finally. 

It went into a recovery period or something? Friends, I'll be honest, I have no idea how the internet works. I was told by the tech team "Just keep refreshing this page and tell us when something changes", and so that's what I did. Every time the whois page updated I would excitedly send a screenshot and they would say "Okay great now keep waiting."

But, as of literally today as I type this, the waiting has paid off. We are once again the owners of https://zooey.pub . All other links now direct back to this URL. 

I can't begin to express to you how excited I am about this. The Discord shutting down was such a huge blow to me, and at time of writing the magazine Twitter has been down for about a month too. The Matrix is still going strong though, thanks to everyone that's joined that! But, to finally get something back. A real victory. When I got the email, I literally got up from my seat and yelled and threw my fists up in the air like I was in a movie. 

Anyway, this was supposed to just be a short update but I accidently typed a lot of words oops. Let me wrap up with this. 

A name is just a name. I get that. Stupid of me to tie so much branding to the name. But, names are also really important. The name of something is the most pure representation of what that thing is. I've probably said the words "Zooey Dot Pub" over a thousand times, not even counting saying "ZDP". And, if we add in all the times I've typed it, it's just an astronomically large number. But, all of that has felt jaded by the fact that our roots, the location where we started online, was still out of our control. 

It feels like I was evicted from my childhood home, but finally saved up enough to buy it back, and now I'm lounging in the living room, making dinner in the kitchen, enjoying the sun in the back yard, and everything is at peace once again.

So yeah, welcome back officially to zooey.pub, the #1 zoosexual lifestyle and advocacy magazine, by zoos for zoos. If you've been around long enough that you visited the old site, then hey thanks for being such a long time reader. And, if this is your first time at our real URL, welcome, hope you like the place. It's certainly much easier to type! 

I just wanted to share a quick win with you all. Sometimes it feels like nothing ever goes right, which makes it all that much more important to tell people it does. Thanks for your patience everyone, I'm going to go back to dancing and yelling and screaming and crying with joy. See you in the next one, at https://zooey.pub! 


Article written by Tarro (September 2025)

Find them at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo 

Questions, comments or concerns? Come chat with us on Matrix! https://join.zooeydotpub.org