This is an important post which effects all users currently enabling the One-by-One option. NameSilo recently made some changes to their system and this has caused the One-by-One option to become a little inaccurate. When doing some testing with One-by-One enabled we noticed that when some domains got picked up by competitors, DesktopCatcher would not automatically move all registration attempts to the next domain. Since the One-by-One feature relies on NameSilo to tell it when a domain is registered, we decided to contact them and ask why their system wasn’t giving the proper ‘already registered’ responses for some drops.

This is what they said: “The problem is that our code that checks to see if a domain has been registered looks at zone files which only have domains that have name servers associated. The domain you listed was registered without name servers (very strange) which is why our system did not recognize it as being registered.”

As you can see, NameSilo normally uses Zone Files to determine when a dropping domain has been registered. However, now that they’ve made changes to their system when domain gets registered and doesn’t have any nameservers assigned to it immediately, then NameSilo doesn’t actually know that it’s been registered. Since NameSilo doesn’t know the domain is now registered, it doesn’t tell DesktopCatcher what is needed for it to automatically move and focus all requests on the next domain in your list. We responded and asked if they had any plans on putting in a fix for this sometime down the line. You can read their response to our email below.

“Possibly, but probably not. VeriSign slapped our hand a few weeks ago due to the look ups we were doing to determine if a domain had been registered so we had to come up with a different solution that has this limitation. We will try to think of something else, but may not happen.”

As you can see from this response, they are thinking of other ways to handle this, but so far it doesn’t look promising. Until they do, the One-by-One feature may not always be accurate and automatically move onto the next domain once the current domain it’s checking has been registered. If you notice this happening to you often, consider running the software without One-by-One enabled.

From what I have personally found in my testing, most of the domains that get registered without nameservers attached to them immediately were caught by one of the bigger backorder outlets. If you are trying to catch highly competitive domains which are getting picked up by the big backorder companies, then it’s more likely you could run into issues with domains getting registered and having no nameservers attached to them. If you’re chasing less competitive domains which the bigger companies might not be going after, you may still have great success with One-by-One enabled and not even experience any kinds of issues.

So, to sum up everything you really need to know from this post. First of all, if you don’t use the One-by-One feature then you can completely disregard it. If you do use the One-by-One feature then you may have sessions where the software never automatically moves onto the next domain in your list once the previous one has been registered. The reason for that is because NameSilo isn’t seeing that the domain has been registered, and therefor DesktopCatcher doesn’t know the domain is already registered. When that happens, you will find the software checking the same domain over the entire drop period. If you run into this problem then you are best to Stop DesktopCatcher and then Run it again without One-by-One enabled. We’ll be looking into other ways we can improve the One-by-One feature, and will be sure to post a blog update once it becomes completely stable again!