[octasimo]

I've also got stood up with fashion.blog. Full refund and no invitation to auction. I haven't even bothered to ask for details, because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying.

[SamBam]

> because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying.

Indeed. Seems like it would be easy for them to use the auction to automatically see "300 people tried to claim this domain, it must be a good one, let's make it premium."

They wouldn't need to spend a penny doing market research to select the premium names themselves.

[brazzledazzle]

That's the feeling I got as well. The answers were really dodgy too. But such an ethically challenged practice would reflect poorly on the WordPress brand and you wouldn't want your low level employees to know about it since they could easily leak it. So maybe the CS reps weren't dodgy so much as trying to keep customers happy with very little information available to them.

Maybe one way you could do it is create a tiny subsidiary to manage the reservations/registration. The subsidiary can be created under the pretenses of shielding the parent company from legal liability so you can both limit the team size, the scope of their purpose and isolate them from the parent company.

Build the backend to provide information on reservations but accessible only to subsidiary financial management/officers and parent company employees whose wealth is tied to the success of shares in the company. Officially only share the total number of reservations and financials with the parent company via something documented like email. Then the backend reporting is decoupled from the reservations that come in for early access. If you setup a distinct founder program and establish enough time between the reservation announcement and when you give normal employees early access you don't even have to worry about your employees snatching up the most profitable ones.

The first the CS reps hear about it is when a reply/complaint comes in from one of the cancellations. When asked their supervisor only knows that the name came over as one of the early access reservations from the parent company. The CS reps don't have enough information to draw conclusions because they don't get access to numbers and an early access employee program provides plausible deniability if the reps start asking questions.

That was kind of a fun mental exercise. I've seen some real cloak and dagger stuff from people but those were always at small companies. I have no idea how plausible any of that would be, especially in companies this big. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a fairly unique but uninteresting domain that wasn't obviously gibberish and a a lot of us put in a reservation for it at random intervals to create a perception of interest and popularity.