Namecheap just snaked another domain off me | Hacker News Reader

Namecheap just snaked another domain off me

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It's worth noting that this happened on the very day that .quest became generally available[1].

I think it's a case of first-day demand, not somebody picking good domains from Namecheap's logs.

[1] https://icannwiki.org/.quest

Edit: technically the next day UTC, but the same day where I am.

There are quite a few people in that thread who claim to have experienced the same thing.

I hope its not true. I really like namecheap. I would hate to have to dump them.

There are ~750k people in that Reddit community, it wouldn't surprise me if by coincidence it happened to bunch of them the a domain was registered between when they searched it and decided to buy.

People have been claiming this forever about various domain registrars, and I just don't buy it. I think people play a logical trick on themselves, or succumb to paranoia, or similar.

They are in the business of selling domains. That means volume is king. They want to move as many units as possible. The idea that they would 'steal' a domain from you right before you were about to pay them money for it is absurd.

They would only be stealing from themselves, by purposefully denying a sale they were about to make. They receive no value by taking domains and sitting on them, or speculating or whatever. They do receive value by making a sale. Sounds like a good way to lose money.

It's much more likely that 10,000 other people had the same idea to get something as popular as 'dnd.quest', than Namecheap 'stole' if from them while it was in their shopping cart.

> They are in the business of selling domains.

Domains that are taken but in demand typically sell for higher than what the default price is.

> It's much more likely that 10,000 other people had the same idea to get something as popular as 'dnd.quest'

According to the post the registration happened 30 seconds to 1 minute after the poster searched for the domain on the registrar. That is quite a coincidence.

I think it would be a massive coincidence for there not to be an instance of two people trying to register the same domain at the same time on the day that a new tld became available.

Quite a coincidence indeed, but that doesn't prove anything.

Important to note, to corroborate their claim, the poster tries to say Namecheap 'owns' the domain because they see namecheap.com in the Registrar URL line of the DNS record. That is just wrong. That's not what that means. It means whoever bought the domain got it through Namecheap.

The TLD just was released on Namecheap, so it's a 'gold rush' situation. '.quest' domains are getting snapped up left and right. My suspicion is that it was purchased shortly before the OP searched it.

Maybe a bug in the search feature, or the new purchase just hadn't propagated though the system, and the user was erroneously shown it as being available.

You are raising good points indeed.

I mean, I'd be mad like that person too if I thought I was about to get a cool domain like that. It would have definitely been a fun one to own :)

I get it, but in their anger, I don't think they are thinking clearly, and then take to Reddit to 'provoke the masses'.

A brilliant model - or better yet, feature - for determining domain worth is whether it's been added to a basket. Why sell a valuable domain for £10 when you can "buy" it yourself and sell it later for £100?

AFAIK the practice hasn't been officially proven, but there's overwhelming amounts of anecdata pointing to this being real and endemic in the industry.

When they identify a valuable domain, they make money off it by giving it the 'Premium' tag, and collecting a substantial one time fee up front.

If this 'practice' of stealing domains were real, wouldn't it be somewhat easy to prove by tracing the puclic DNS records? Also, I have to imagine it is probably illegal from the position of the registrar. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to take this to court?

Yes there are lots of anecdotes about this going back a long time. I just don't buy them. I think in these cases folks forget to apply critical thinking, and succumb to logical fallacies or pure paranoia.

The Namecheap CEO has unequivocally stated they don’t do this. My impression of them is that they’ve bought a lot of goodwill by landing on what I consider to be the right side of a lot of domain related debates.

Losing out in the gold rush on a new TLD doesn’t mean Namecheap cheated you. Right?

Namecheap posted an update [0]:

"UPDATE:

"Wanted to provide an update on this. As you may or may not know, .quest launched this week, and this is a 3 letter domain on top of that, hence the demand. The registrant of this domain is on our platform but is only a customer who historically has purchased domains in a similar vein. As I said earlier, our platform has never been known to register domains after lookup, nor do we share this data with any third parties.

"We have confirmed that the registrant has no affiliation whatsoever with our staff or any of our partners.

"Further, to discuss the logs, the registrant added it to their cart immediately after searching for it, at 2021-03-03 00:18:13.566638 UTC. The OP searched for it but never added it to his cart, looking for it literally a minute before the person who actually registered it checked out (at 2021-03-03 00:17:38.875854 UTC).

"This was merely a coincidence, as we do process hundreds of thousands of domain searches per day.

"Hope that clarifies."

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_ju...

Someone who claims to work at NC responded down that thread saying "Hi - I'll look into this further as I work with Namecheap, but we don't have a history of doing this as you state."

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_ju...

Based on the account history, it does look like they work there.

https://www.reddit.com/user/tamar

That reddit link has since been updated with an explanation (basically that it really is just a coincidence):

> Wanted to provide an update on this. As you may or may not know, .quest launched this week, and this is a 3 letter domain on top of that, hence the demand. The registrant of this domain is on our platform but is only a customer who historically has purchased domains in a similar vein. As I said earlier, our platform has never been known to register domains after lookup, nor do we share this data with any third parties.

> We have confirmed that the registrant has no affiliation whatsoever with our staff or any of our partners.

> Further, to discuss the logs, the registrant added it to their cart immediately after searching for it, at 2021-03-03 00:18:13.566638 UTC. The OP searched for it but never added it to his cart, looking for it literally a minute before the person who actually registered it checked out (at 2021-03-03 00:17:38.875854 UTC).

> This was merely a coincidence, as we do process hundreds of thousands of domain searches per day.

I've never had this happen in 20 years of buying hundreds of domains and searches for thousands. I've been exclusively using NameCheap for 5ish years now, too.

The business model doesn't even make sense. How many domains would Namecheap be rolling the dice on if they did this after a single search?

If billions of domain searches happen every year, we're going to see quite a few coincidences like this. An anecdote is not proof, and it's not like this domain (dnd.quest) was incredibly unique.

The people in that thread need to loosen their tinfoil hats. Namecheap didn't steal anything. dnd.quest is certainly one of the most wanted among everyone who was buying a .quest domain. Do these people not understand just how many people there are who are thinking the same thing as them?

It really is a great illustration of how dumb people can be in mobs. Now there is a hoard of redditors running around screaming at the top of their lungs, "Did you see the evil Namecheap stole that domain from that guy".

Meanwhile, no critical thinking is happening, they just accept it, and will pass the 'news' on to others. The others won't look into at all, and by next week it will be a 'truth' that Namecheap 'steals' domains.

This is exactly what I'm afraid of. I have no specific love for namecheap (I can't even remember if I've ever used them) but I don't want to see their name dragged through the mud.

Shit like this is the downside of giving everyone a soapbox and a megaphone. There's no easy answer on how to stop misinformation.

I just tried to buy wow.quest 2 minutes ago and it feels like the same thing just happened to me. Between me searching and checking out it got registered:

  Registrar URL: https://namecheap.com
  Updated Date: 2021-03-03T14:30:25.0Z
  Creation Date: 2021-03-03T14:30:20.0Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-03T23:59:59.0Z

Namecheap gave me a "Oops, looks like the domain was taken by someone else, so we removed the domain from your cart."

Hmm, could it be a system glitch when Namecheap tries to register the domain for you during checkout? This seems less likely to be a coincidence.

The registrar is not the registrant, this just means someone bought it on namecheap.

So by your account, someone at NS tails the search log and hits "buy" when they see something nice like wow.quest?

Didn't say that. It's not clear to me what happened, could be a number of things. Probably coincidence.

Just felt like I had the same experience as the person on Reddit. Went to buy an unregistered domain, and it got registered by someone else immediately after I searched for it.

If they're really doing this (and I don't particularly doubt it) someone should script up a little bot to search for domain names that are likely to trigger the mechanism. Find word clouds around some of the newer domains like .quest with characters under a certain limit...

...or perhaps that's feeding the beast and namecheap will be thanking us in 5 years when people are knocking down their doors for the hot domains we generated.

If the goal was to find out the keywords, it would feed the beast, but if the goal was to bump their expenses in hopes they turn it off, you'd need a serious amount of domains for them to autobuy!

If this is the case, and it has happened already to the OP.. How could you have confidence going BACK to namecheap for it to happen again..

I've always thought that Namecheap is one of the good guys. I'll wait for an answer from them, before judging.

Do people not know about Domain "front running"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

It's been "a thing" for years and has changed the way I search for domains.

i lost ftuff.com over them (just skip a renewal) and they're trying to sell it back for 10k

You have to miss the renewal and the redemption to lose a domain these days, don’t you?

They give a lot of notice about renewals as well—unless you've nixed getting emails them.

This never happened to me, and I bought a number of short domains.

That would imply that they only snatch some domains. But in that case, if they had a way to determine which domains are valuable, why would they wait for a search in the first place?

Also, this is the kind of scam that is quick to ruin a company reputation, snatch a few valuable domains, but then lose tens of thousands of registrations because people start avoid you.

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