The million dollar question for us at the moment is "when will Land.com.au drop" and why has it not dropped yet?.
So what happend to land.com.au? Well according to our calculations the name was scheduled to be purged on the 19th. So we naturally asked the registry support why it did not get purged on time when it should have. When that question could not be resolved to their satisfaction within 24 hours they prudently decided to delay the drops while they investigate the cause.
To minimise the disruption to our industry they kept the expired domain purge and only delayed the pendingDelete purge.
In theory this means that land.com.au should be purged tomorrow (the 21st) together with all the PDs from the 20th, unless we hear otherwise.
We understand that this is confusing and is disruptive, but if you have a bid in the system for Land.com.au you can rest assured that we are keeping a close eye on this and will keep rolling your offers over as we wait for the official purge.
We will attempt to update this article if there are further delays announced.
If you have any questions or concerns please contact us via email on support@drop.com.au
UPDATE: 21/2/2019 Land.com.au did get purged on the 21st and we managed to catch it. It sold for $100,000 equaling broker.com.au at the top of our sales leaderboard. Congratulations to the new owner.
UPDATE: 4/6/2019 Land.com.au is dropping again in 8 days time (2019-06-12)
We allow bidding on domains as soon as they appear on the Official drop lists provided by Afilias so you can use the link below to place bids now (if you want to) or you can participate on the day.
https://www.drop.com.au/my_account/crs.php?pdatefrom=2019-06-12
Why is the domain being policy deleted?
We temporarily used our Registrar credentials to register the domain name. This is not allowed under current auDA policies.
Why did it take so long to get deleted?
We used both the internal and external review process to ensure that we had a fair review.
Overall this was a time consuming process but it does provide us with some closure.
Why did the domain drop three times last time?
On day 1 the domain was scheduled to be deleted 15 minutes away from the drop zone but the list of domains to purge was already determined an hour earlier so it would have been purged on day 2.
On day 2 the Registry Operator blocked the drops for the day to investigate what happened on day 1 due to both drop catchers reporting a problem.
On day 3 the Registry Operator had concluded their investigation and purged the domain name.
Will the next drop also be delayed?
The Registry Operator has corrected the original issue by putting domains which are scheduled to be purged in the final hour on the list for an extra day, so some Policy Deletes now have 15 days. This means that the purge dates published by the Registry Operator are now more predictable.
There are still a few other known issues which can cause delays and have not been addressed yet by the Registry Operator so there is still a potential for delays.
If there are any delays then bids placed on the 12th will be carried forward to the next day.
Why did you use your registrar credentials?
We believed that we could act as an agent for a customer if you had a pre-existing order and acting as an agent is not an unprecedented as many registrars currently do this. However according to auDA policies, this is not allowed and only enforced if there is a complaint. Unfortunately one of our competitors, that is also in the drop space made a complaint to auDA.
Did you learn anything?
Firstly we have a new found sympathy for defendants. Waiting in the dark for weeks on end for auDA is really frustrating, we got unlucky and had a complaint during auDAs migration onto a new complaints system. We trust that those delays are now behind auDA and it will be smoother moving forward.
Secondly not knowing who the complainant is can be unfair. For years we have argued that complaints should stay anonymous but we have learned now that auDA does actually consider extra information provided by complainants. If indefensible evidence is going to be considered by auDA, which is not provided to the defendant, then we need to join the chorus of people saying that the complaints process should no longer be anonymous and that the defendant had a right to know who the complainant is in order to effectively defend themselves against evidence which cannot be independently verified by auDA.
If you have further questions or specific concerns feel free to contact us via email on support@drop.com.au and we will answer any questions which we can.
Regards
Drop Catching Team
