It's worth noting that this happened on the very day that .quest became generally available[1].<p>I think it's a case of first-day demand, not somebody picking good domains from Namecheap's logs.<p>[1] <a href="https://icannwiki.org/.quest" rel="nofollow">https://icannwiki.org/.quest</a><p>Edit: technically the next day UTC, but the same day where I am.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>do</i> receive value by making a sale. Sounds like a good way to lose money.<p>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.
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.<p>Losing out in the gold rush on a new TLD doesn’t mean Namecheap cheated you. Right?
Namecheap posted an update [0]:<p>"UPDATE:<p>"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.<p>"We have confirmed that the registrant has no affiliation whatsoever with our staff or any of our partners.<p>"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).<p>"This was merely a coincidence, as we do process hundreds of thousands of domain searches per day.<p>"Hope that clarifies."<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_just_snaked_another_domain_off_me/gpjpy2k/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_ju...</a>
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."<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_just_snaked_another_domain_off_me/gphflie/?context=3" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lwgrkz/namecheap_ju...</a><p>Based on the account history, it does look like they work there.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/tamar" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/user/tamar</a>
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.<p>The business model doesn't even make sense. How many domains would Namecheap be rolling the dice on if they did this after a <i>single</i> search?<p>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?
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:<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
Namecheap gave me a "Oops, looks like the domain was taken by someone else, so we removed the domain from your cart."
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...<p>...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.
Do people not know about Domain "front running"? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running</a><p>It's been "a thing" for years and has changed the way I search for domains.
This never happened to me, and I bought a number of short domains.<p>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?<p>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.