Visitors to VALISE Gallery’s website last week may have been greeted with something quite different than expected, and gallery members are urging the public to use the gallery’s new site: valisegallery.com.

The gallery’s old website domain name was auctioned off earlier this month after the credit card on file expired, and the domain now leads to a pornographic site.

“No one wants their website taken over like that, but it’s kind of funny,” VALISE’s Lynn Holly said last week. “By Monday we were laughing, but we weren’t laughing last week.”

VALISE founding member JiJi Saudners was responsible for the website, but the credit card she was using for the site’s monthly payments expired in February. She realized the site had changed last Sunday when she tried to access it from her phone.

“I was at my daughter’s lacrosse game and decided to go to the website to see (some work an artist was displaying),” Saunders said. “I typed in our website address and here comes all this porn and Russian writing. Naturally, I blame my phone.”

But it wasn’t her phone. After her husband tried to access the site with the same result, Saunders decided the site must have been hacked. But it wasn’t hacked either.

“We call Go Daddy (the web domain registrar), and the guy says he has bad news,” Saunders said. “The card expired and the domain was auctioned.”

Saunders said she never got any warning because her email address had changed since she set up the site.

“We had this mishap where we changed the website, which in turn changed our email addresses. Go Daddy sent the email to the defunct email and auctioned off the domain,” Saunders said. “At first I just couldn’t believe how much stuff had been thrown onto our site. Then I was happy to get the other (.com) site. Then we just all had a good laugh.”

VALISE Gallery can be visited online at valisegallery.com.