Godaddy Is Auctioning a 15-Year-Old .org From an Foss Volunteer Group – Help?

Hi all — I help manage somosazucar.org, one of the local volunteer groups of Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the open-source Sugar Learning Platform originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

SomosAzúcar has supported open education and children’s digital literacy initiatives across Latin America since 2009.

The domain expired on 2025-10-06, but due to a Postfix configuration issue on sugarlabs.org, GoDaddy’s renewal notices never reached us.

By the time we discovered the problem — about 35 days after expiration — GoDaddy informed us that the domain was already being prepared for auction, and that the only way to recover it would be to bid for it like any other buyer.

It feels wrong that a long-standing nonprofit project could lose its .org domain over a technical mail glitch.

Has anyone here faced something similar with GoDaddy or other registrars?

Is there any way to appeal to PIR (.org registry) or GoDaddy executive support to restore the domain before it’s auctioned?

Any advice or contacts would be deeply appreciated — this domain represents more than 15 years of open education work.

OP here, the actual content of the missing domain is here: https://somosazucar.github.io/www-blog/ for now