What Happened to SavePapaJohns.com: The Founder's Website the Settlement Never Mentioned

In August 2018, John Schnatter took out a full-page ad in the Courier Journal, the hometown paper of the pizza company he had founded. Bloomberg reported that the ad sent Papa John's employees to a website, SavePapaJohns.com. The home page opened with four words, "I AM PAPA JOHN," and a short message below them: "The Board wants to silence me. So this is my website, and my way to talk to you."

Fifteen months later, that page was still online. Eight years later, it was long gone. The fight ended in a filed contract that names shares, directors, lawsuits, and a rights plan, and that says nothing about the website. A public registry record, checked in November 2026, shows that the current registration of SavePapaJohns.com began on October 31, 2020. Since then the address has shown, among other things, an Indonesian technology blog and a WordPress site in Arabic. Neither home page mentions Schnatter or the company in the captures reviewed for this article.

The sources reviewed here contain no announcement of any of this. A domain can serve as the podium of a corporate fight, but the podium needs renewing. After the fight, its fate depends on what the contracts say and on who keeps the renewal records.

The founder lost his company platforms before he built his own

Schnatter had already given up one title by then. His Schedule 13D filing says he officially stepped down as chief executive on January 1, 2018. CBS MoneyWatch tied that exit to his criticism of NFL players who knelt during the anthem. He stayed on as chairman.

In July 2018, Forbes reported that Schnatter had used a racial slur on a May conference call with the marketing agency Laundry Service. Forbes described the call as a role-playing exercise meant to prevent future incidents. Bloomberg later wrote that he admitted using the slur but said he was taken out of context.

The company's filings then record a fast separation. On July 11, the independent directors accepted his resignation as chairman, although he kept his board seat. On July 15, the company gave notice ending his founder agreement, a contract that covered his role as advertising and brand spokesperson. It also gave notice ending a sublease that let him use office space at headquarters. On July 22, the board adopted a stockholder rights plan with a 15% trigger for other holders and a 31% limit for Schnatter and his affiliates.

He no longer had the chair or the spokesperson role, and Bloomberg described him as blocked from headquarters. He regretted the resignation, Bloomberg reported, and he sued for access to books and records. He still held roughly 30 percent of the stock. The website, Bloomberg wrote, was a bet that franchisees and workers would have his back.

The website gave one shareholder a voice and an archive

The earliest certificates in the public log for the name came from Let's Encrypt and carry a start date of August 21, 2018. The earliest Wayback Machine capture came the next day, and CBS and TIME both published on August 22.

The design was plain. The menu had four items: Home, About, Recent Developments, and News Coverage. The note on the home page spoke to staff and franchisees directly. "I miss you all very much," it said. It promised "links to recent press releases, news articles, and public filings." It called Schnatter the company's "largest shareholder" and said "we are getting the truth out there." Those were his claims, stated in his voice.

The inner pages worked as a file room. An archived statement dated March 5, 2019 sits under a category for statements and press releases. The site also held categories for letters and legal documents, so the founder's version of the dispute lived at one address outside the company's channels.

Papa John's answered by email. "We are not, nor should we be, dependent on one person," a spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. The spokesperson added that "No matter what John does, he will not be able to distract from the inappropriate comments he made."

No public source reviewed for this article shows who registered the name, on what date, or for how many years. The site says "my website," which is a claim of authorship, not a registration record. An EDGAR full-text search for the string "savepapajohns" returned no filings on November 3, 2026.

The settlement closed the fight and left the website out

The contest turned in February 2019. On February 4, Starboard Value invested $200 million, and the company agreed to make Jeff Smith chairman. CNBC reported that Schnatter offered a competing proposal, that a special committee rejected it, and, citing a company spokesman, that he voted against the Starboard deal. Two weeks later he filed an amended complaint in Delaware against the rights plan and the Starboard voting terms.

The end came quickly. The agreement of March 4, 2019 runs nine pages plus a form of dismissal. Its main terms were these:

• Schnatter's term as a director would end at the 2019 annual meeting.
• The two sides would look for a mutually acceptable independent director.
• The company would remove the "acting in concert" language from the rights plan.
• The company would delete one section of its governance agreement with Starboard.
• Schnatter would dismiss the Delaware case without prejudice.
• A Kentucky action brought by Evergreen Real Estate, LLC would be dismissed with prejudice.
• The company would produce the books and records that the court had ordered.

The agreement also recites that he beneficially owned about 31% of the common stock. The words "website" and "domain" appear nowhere in it, and neither does the address. Its integration clause says the document holds the parties' entire understanding "with respect to its subject matter." The site itself published a statement on the deal under the headline "Board Agrees To John's Demand That It Remove Shareholder Restrictions." That statement does not mention the site either.

The silence has limits as evidence. The filed agreement cannot rule out a private arrangement. It does show that the public contract which closed the dispute gave the domain no owner, no duty, and no end date. The website continued.

The page kept its claim while the shares moved

After the board seat ended, the filings tell a different story from the page. Schnatter's term expired on April 30, 2019, and his filing that spring said he intended to sell. He did.

A capture from November 1, 2019, the day of the block sale reported in the last filing, still opens with the sentence "I built Papa John's from the ground up and remain its largest shareholder." A copy from November 20 says the same. The filing does not show whether anyone else held more on that date, so this article does not call the sentence false. Captures from May, August, and November 2019 show only that the home page wording stayed the same while the reported stake fell. The last statement listed in the November 2019 copies is dated August 27, 2019, and concerns the appointment of Rob Lynch as chief executive.

A later comparison came in the 2020 proxy statement. As of February 24, 2020, it listed Schnatter at 6.1%, the last of the seven holders of more than 5% in its table. Starboard, AllianceBernstein, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, Jackson Square Partners, and Vanguard all appeared above him.

The public logs date the site's end only within a wide window

The sources reviewed here contain no announcement of the site's end. The trail appears in three public logs, and each one proves only what it records.

The first log is certificate history. The public log shows new Let's Encrypt certificates roughly every two and a half months from August 2018. The last one in that run started on October 30, 2019, and expired on January 28, 2020. The next certificate in the log came from Cloudflare on November 8, 2020. The gap of about nine months suggests that no one was renewing certificates for the old site, although it cannot show why.

The second log is the Wayback Machine. Its index lists no capture of the home page between November 20, 2019, and August 20, 2020. The August 2020 capture shows only a notice that the site requires JavaScript and cookies. A capture on November 6, 2020 shows an error page that begins "Error. Page cannot be displayed."

The third log is the registry. Its record gives a registration date of October 31, 2020, more than two years after the Schnatter site went online. The narrow reading is that the registration behind the 2018 site ended and that the name was registered again. That is an inference from the dates. The first registration date and the date the earlier registration lapsed remain unknown, and no source reviewed here says who decided not to renew or whether anyone decided at all.

The address later carried pages unrelated to the fight

By November 11, 2020, the home page was an Indonesian blog titled "SavePapaJohns - Referensi Teknologi Digital." The posts in that capture covered business-card sizes and résumé examples. The name stayed in the title, and the subject did not. A capture from January 2022 shows tutorials on Windows activation and video editing.

Captures from 2024 onward show a WordPress site in Arabic, with the stock welcome post dated March 25, 2023. The page was still there in August 2025 and on July 13, 2026. Archive pages prove what an address displayed at capture time. They do not identify a holder, and this article does not name one or attribute any motive to one. Whether any domain raised a trademark question is also outside this account. Readers who want the general framework can start with Namefi's explainer on cybersquatting, the UDRP, and the ACPA.

The latest snapshot in this account is dated. At 02:28 UTC on November 4, 2026, the evening of November 3 in the United States, the registry record showed a last change on November 2, 2026, and an expiration date of October 31, 2027. Its two name servers were NS1.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM and NS2.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM, and its registrar link pointed to Network Solutions. One domain-industry blog has described those servers as the ones Network Solutions uses when a domain is expired, in a post about a case where they appeared in error. The address returned an error page at that check. Neither field says who holds the name or whether anyone renewed it, and the live record may differ by the time you read this.

Campaign domains need four decisions before the fight starts

A campaign site is quick to start and easy to forget. Four habits address the gaps in this story.

• Name one owner. Put the registrant of record in writing, whether a person, a company, or a committee. A byline on a home page does not answer that question.
• Assign the renewal. Give one person the renewal date, the registrar login, and a payment method that will outlast the campaign. Set a date to decide whether to keep or release the name.
• Handle the domain in any settlement. Say who keeps the name, what happens to the content, how long it stays online, and who pays. A sentence is enough. Silence leaves the question to the next expiration date.
• Preserve an archive. Export the pages, save the letters and filings, and request Wayback captures while the site is live. Check the public registration data and keep a dated copy.

SavePapaJohns.com carried one side of a public fight. The agreement that ended the fight listed what the parties chose to settle. The domain was not on the list, so its future fell to the next renewal date.

Sources and further reading

All sources below were fetched between 2026-11-03 and 2026-11-04 UTC. Forbes and TIME links point to Wayback Machine copies because the live pages blocked retrieval.

SEC filings

• Papa John's International — Form 8-K, July 12, 2018 (chairman resignation accepted July 11)
• Papa John's International — Form 8-K, July 16, 2018 (founder agreement and sublease terminated)
• Papa John's International — Form 8-K, July 23, 2018 (rights plan, 15% and 31% thresholds)
• Papa John's International — Form 8-K, February 4, 2019 (Starboard transaction and chairman appointment)
• Papa John's International and John H. Schnatter — Agreement dated March 4, 2019, Exhibit 10.1
• John H. Schnatter — Schedule 13D/A No. 31, No. 33, No. 34, No. 35, and No. 36
• Papa John's International — 2020 proxy statement (ownership table as of February 24, 2020)

Reporting

• Leslie Patton, Bloomberg via TIME — Papa John's Exiled Founder John Schnatter Is Going to War With the Company's Leaders, August 22, 2018
• Kate Gibson, CBS MoneyWatch — Papa John's exiled founder launches SavePapaJohn's.com, August 22, 2018
• Noah Kirsch, Forbes — John Schnatter Resigns As Chair Of Papa John's Following Forbes Report, July 11, 2018
• CNBC — Papa John's strikes deal with Starboard in hopes of ending feud with founder, but Schnatter says he had rival plan, February 4, 2019
• Elliot Silver, DomainInvesting.com — Network Solutions Error Impacting Domain Names

Domain records

• Verisign RDAP — SAVEPAPAJOHNS.COM (live record; values quoted above come from the lookup at 2026-11-04 02:28 UTC)
• crt.sh — Certificate Transparency search for savepapajohns.com
• Internet Archive — capture index for savepapajohns.com and the individual captures linked in the text