Maybe it is not our fault. Maybe the server, the curl command is aiming for, is down or similar. But this is only one hypothesis.
That is also my hypothesis, as I checked the link to the webbtc block explorer in the error message and I get the same HTTP 500 error in a browser.
But ... if all what the "light client" does is to connect to a single, centralized block explorer to show the status of a name, what is its purpose? I could use curl, wget or another tool connecting
directly to the block explorer and would need no light client. And the light client
does download a part of the blockchain.
So I guess that there is some additional configuration step I didn't see, to ensure the light client checks several nodes for the required information (and not only the webbtc node). However, in the documentation, the URL of the webbtc block explorer is also mentioned several times.
And I have to admit, that I do not understand the curl command yet.
The curl command basically does what the "name_show" command of the namecoin-cli program would do (it basically shows who registered a domain/name, see
here), only that you send it in JSON format directly to the "server" (in this case, your light client acts as a server).
By the way: Just read
this reddit message - it seems that electrum-nmc isn't dead and is intended to be used in the future for name registrations. Maybe it's - once ready - a better choice for end users than the difficult-to-use consensusj client, but it should at least upgraded to v3.0.5 because of the vulnerability.