Oops.

Somebody forgot to pay the bill for the Borough of Coplay's website at borougofcoplay.org.

As a result, the site is now in Japanese.

"In recent years, Fx as a means of asset management has been very popular investment methods," says the website, as translated via Paralink Online. "The markets are open 24 hours for the Internet environment where they can be from anywhere at any time you can take part."

From Internet searches, Fx Online Japan appears to be a company involved in online trading.

The person who didn't pay the bill is an outside contractor, said borough Secretary-Treasurer Sandra Gyecsek.

"That was a big oops on his part," said police Chief Vincent Genovese in response to questions from resident Anne Killeen. She spoke during the first of two public comment periods at the Feb. 5 workshop.

Killeen asked if the borough reported to the Lehigh County District Attorney or the U.S. Office of Homeland Security that the site was hacked.

"It wasn't hacked," said Gyecsek. "The site name was sold out from under us."

Genovese said the outside vendor does not maintain the website. His function was only to purchase and renew the domain name.

Killeen was asked to wait until Gyecsek gave her formal report on the website about 45 minutes into the meeting, which lasted an hour and 45 minutes total.

"What happened was our computer guy, who's in charge of it, was supposed to pay that bill and he didn't so someone else bought [the domain name]," said Gyecsek during her report.

Although a disclaimer says it cannot guarantee the accuracy of search results, as of Tuesday night, Public Interest Registry listed the Borough of Coplay as the current owner of the domain name boroughofcoplay.org and Gyecsek as site administrator. The Public Interest Registry is a nonprofit group that manages .org domain names and is involved in setting Internet policy.

According to the Public Interest Registry search results, the domain is registered to the borough through Oct. 30 and the site was last updated Jan. 23. That update apparently took place the same day more than 1,000 residents lost heat due to a UGI equipment failure.

"No one could get on [the website] to see what was going on," said Gyecsek, referring to the events of Jan. 23. "When it went down we didn't know what was going on either."

Borough employees have all the information needed for the website on their computer desktops, she said. Once the problem was discovered, all they needed to do was find another domain name. They purchased two, coplaypa.org and coplayborough.org.

"If I understand correctly it's because ... somebody didn't renew the website as in a job wasn't done," said Killeen, continuing her questioning during the second public comment period.

"This is an outside vendor," said Gyecsek. "It was our computer guy. He was told about it."

"You relegated power to him. His power was to renew this. He messed up," said Killeen, who wanted to know who was responsible for the error.

"The bill doesn't come here," said Gyecsek.

"I will be speaking to him," said Genovese. "We will be getting the invoices for our own domain names. He had always handled that and it was an understanding he would take care of it. Well, guess what? He dropped the ball."

"Actually, we had an issue last year, too," said Gyecsek. "[The website was] shut down for a couple days because he didn't renew last year."

Genovese said he read news reports that say people are purchasing domain names that have not been renewed in hopes of selling them back at a considerable profit.

Gyecsek and Genovese said they hope the borough will be able to get its original domain name back in a year or two. In the meantime, the official website address is now coplayborough.org. Gyecsek said Wikipedia and search engines have been notified but it will take a couple weeks for these to be updated.

Killeen said the website would have been useful during the UGI crisis.

"I don't think it's right that the people of Coplay should have to pay to get the website redone," said Killeen.

Gyecsek said so far the borough has not received a bill from the contractor for the purchase of the other two domain names.