Websites moving to go.th domains

Recently I found a list of all the local administration heads in Suphanburi province, although a bit outdated as it seems to be last updated in 2008. While I worked through that list and added the names in the Suphanburi XML, I also tried to verify the names with the websites of the corresponding municipalities and TAO. Even though about a year ago I had worked through all the provinces and added all the websites, in just the short time since then several local governments moved their website to a new location, as well as some which completely disappeared and other which got their very first website.

One thing which was noticeable for those websites which had changed their location was the trend from the generic top level domain com (and less common org and net) to the Thai government domain suffix go.th. Which is actually the much more fitting domain, especially if one remembers that the com originally stood for commercial, quite the opposite with government units. Also, these domain have the big advantage that they cannot get taken over by domain grabbers in case the administrator forgets to renew the name registration - lets not forget the infamous ProtectTheKing "hacking". Only thing which I don't like is the fact that there is no way to find the website of a given local government unit other than using Google - all kinds of romanization schemes are used, especially for the non-unique names one can find websites of different municipalities/TAO at any thinkable of the spelling variants.

But back to the subjective trend of moving into the go.th domain. A few examples of moves are below.

• Ban Chan TAO, Galyani Vadhana district, Chiang Mai moved from banghang.org to banchan.go.th
• Bak Ruea TAO, Maha Chana Chai district, Yasothon moved from bakreu.co.cc (still online) to bakruea.go.th
• Dong Yai TAO, Wapi Pathum district, Maha Sarakham moved from tamboldongyai.org to dongyai.go.th

But for every rule there's the exception, this one from Nakhon Phanom province. The TAO Phra Klang Thung was previously found at praklang.go.th but is now at praklang.com.