The original KiCad domain name (kicad-pcb.org) was recently sold to an unnamed third party that is not affiliated with the KiCad Project or members of the KiCad Development Team. This sale was unexpected and may pose a risk to KiCad users. The new owners may simply post advertisements or (worst-case scenario) they may host malicious versions of the KiCad software for download.
See [https://www.kicad.org/blog/2021/10/Avoi ... ad-domain/](https://www.kicad.org/blog/2021/10/Avoid-links-to-former-kicad-domain/) for the full details.
As a result, the KiCad team are asking anyone with web pages, YouTube videos, etc to make their best effort to change any references to the old kicad-pcb.org to the current kicad.org domain name. I did a quick search in the SparkFun learning system, and the first hit when searching for “KiCad” is the “Beginner’s Guide to KiCad”, where on the second page the link to download KiCad uses the old domain name. This reference and any others (I stopped searching when I found the one link) should be updated.
Thanx for updating Nate’s tutorial. There is a comment on that tutorial from “Santa Claus Impersonator” linking to tutorials at the now bad URL. I don’t know if your database allows changing comments…
I did discover one more item that should probably be updated, a blog post from MTaylor here: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2041 that links to the bad URL in the top of the blog.
Apparently the old site has gone live with an older version of the actual website. It wants people to download v5.1.6 and the current stable is 5.1.10. So far it seems to be pulling the (at least windows, I didn’t check other platforms) install archive from the proper CERN site, but who knows if or when the linked installer won’t be a trojan carrier (this is a concern from the devs because they have no control of the old URL, nor are they in contact with the current owners of that domain…).
Hi! Thanks for letting us know. “Santa Claus Impersonator” is also on the documentation team and we updated the comment. I updated the blog post link from “MTaylor” as well. I did a search through our internal system and I did not find any links to the old domain through the blogs or tutorials. Ahhhh, that is super sketchy with the old site going live with the older version of the actual website. I left a warning in the “Beginner’s Guide to KiCad” about what’s going on.
Looking through the some of the Resources and Going Further, there is a link that goes to an online tutorial from Contextual Electronics. In the description of a few of their videos, it points to the old site. I tried leaving a comment but it doesn’t seem to show up. I am not sure if they deleted it or it was somehow marked as spam? I’ll see if I can notify Chris in the KiCad forums.
Sembazuru, it looks like one of your messages on that blog also has the old domain link => https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2041#comm … 546e8b4567. I found it doing a search with Google. Can you update that if you have a moment?
Thank you for catching that. I think I looked right over it because I was looking for clickable links. I’ve fixed it so you don’t have to manually dig through the site database.