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.
I hope its not true. I really like namecheap. I would hate to have to dump them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Losing out in the gold rush on a new TLD doesn’t mean Namecheap cheated you. Right?
"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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_ju...
Based on the account history, it does look like they work there.
> 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.
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.
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.
Shit like this is the downside of giving everyone a soapbox and a megaphone. There's no easy answer on how to stop misinformation.
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
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.
...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.
It's been "a thing" for years and has changed the way I search for 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.