An unfortunate and serious fire has more or less destroyed the computer lab at the University of Southampton, UK, which was hosting the www2006.org website and mailing lists.
The conference organizers have set up temporary page to allow papers to be submitted.
The deadline for submitting papers has been postponed till November 11.
The conference organizers have asked me to post the following message:
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Extension: The submission deadline for WWW2006 refereed papers has been extended to Friday November 11 11:59PM Hawaii time (hard deadline).
As you may know, on Sunday October 30 there was a significant fire at the site hosting the www2006 server. No one will be allowed into the building until Christmas and half the research labs are completely destroyed.
We attempted to mask the failure with a temporary site and have restored the site as quickly as possible in order to maintain the original deadline. But we have become aware that DNS and routing problems are still causing locations to be unable to reach the site even as late as Friday November 4th 2005.
Given these technical difficulties, the fairest thing to do seems to be to grant a blanket 1-week extension, until November 11th 2005.
In fairness to those who submitted on time and managed to find the web site, we will allow revised versions of papers to be uploaded up to the new deadline.
We apologize unreservedly for the confusion stemming from this fire and its aftermath - its been an interesting exercise in network complexity, and at least nobody was hurt - and we thank you for very much for submitting your work to WWW2006.
TEMPORARY WWW2006 WEBSITE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ but SHOULD be visible at www2006.org DIRECT ACCESS to the paper submission website: http:// www.openconf.org/www2006/ TEMPORARY EMAIL FOR ENQUIRIES: lescarr@gmail.com
Information about the fire can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/england/hampshire/4390048.stm.