[40four]

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.

[remirk]

> 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.

[40four]

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.

[remirk]

You are raising good points indeed.

[40four]

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'.

[paulgb]

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.

[fumblebee]

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.

[40four]

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.