Anybody losing domains to METAPREDICT?
 

Been using whois.sc to search for domains for years...

However, this past week i had jotted down 3 or 4 'maybes' to my list of several domains to register - sleep on them overnight kind of thing.

Next morning, I go to register, and they're gone. Very unusual, especially considering the extremely unlikely possibility of that happening. I mean, it hasn't happened in my 4+ years of registering domains.

Anyways, I do a bit more poking around, and find that these domains are all reg'd by 'Metapredict', and a bit more poking suggests that they are immediately 'tasting' or 'kiting' the domain for 5 days, and if they're not interested releasing them under some type of 5 day grace period rule.

Long story short, this sucks. Anyone had this happen, and if so, how do you get around it?

Well if you use a website that is not yours to do your whois searches, obviously someone has access to that data.

Never search unless you are going to buy it right then. (So I have read numerous times)

yeah its happened to me and thats why I stopped searching for domains like that. domain tasting is real and it sux.

they sell the search data

Install a WHOIS script on your own server/webspace, which will query NSI directly. If a domain is not found then no other parties know about it except for you, and the tech at NSI.

You can also do the command 'whois domain.com' from a *nix shell prompt, if you have SSH access.

Hi, thanks for the input. Any ideas where I might buy / or download a script that safely does this?

That's a good idea...

Another way is to just type in the domain that you want and see if a site pops up..If it doesn't, sleep on it and the next day, search for it and buy it immediately.

I've had that happen a couple times when I used namecheap to see if the domains were available. :(

Heres some tips for you

-use a registrar that lets you delete domains. they'll usually give you 5 days so you can reg right away, think about it and if you don't want em, toss em back.

-when this does happen usually they are just tasting them and will throw them back in a few days so don't try and access the url, that will just show the domain is gettin traffic just wait and try next week and chances are they'll be available. though this also means the domain didn't perform well enough for them to keep it.

happened to me with really juicy pantyhose domain, I was really pissed off

do you recall who regged it? Belgiumdomains perhaps?

One of them was regged by 'eCorp'.

Can you recommend a couple please?

Moniker is one that lets you delete domains.

Happened to us recently as well. No more sleeping on it...

Nope, but the fuckers grabbed a typo of one of the domains for a site I've been managing, and were smart enough to have a javascript top.location=href in it..

this thread has value, up to the top.

Yep I had one stolen from me last week. Time to get my own whois script.