Big kudos to the executives manning the dot .CLUB Registry, for researching, acknowledging, and – most importantly – owning a Registry error.
It all started with the astonishing manual registration of the domain name Credit.Club.
Registrant Bruce Marler, a developer that shared the classroom stage on rapid WordPress development with wife Tiffany during NamesCon, was equally shocked with his own success at registering such a top notch keyword+gTLD combination.
And yet, it was all due to a Registry glitch, that allowed for the domain, while in transfer to a special premium account, to remain available for anyone to register, albeit for a short time frame.
The window was 25 hours, and Bruce Marler managed to pull a winning ticket out of the lottery machine, so to speak.
What followed, was a combination of rush to develop and capitalize on the potential and inherent traffic after the story went viral, and a flood of comments from those unwilling to believe that the registration was kosher and not made as part of a marketing ploy by .CLUB.
Indeed, after researching the incident, dot .CLUB CEO, Colin Campbell announced that the .CLUB Registry acknowledged its own error, and despite its rights to reclaim the domain, they would let it remain in the possession of its new registrant and for the benefit of the domain community.
The most important characteristic of any industry is its ethics, and the dot .CLUB Registry maxed out the scale with this decision on the fate of Credit.Club.
It is good to see this level of integrity. I’ve had a number of ‘premium’ .TV domains that were drop caught pulled back by the registry.