IDNTools Blog

As the only commercial provider of user friendly lists of dropping IDNs, you’d think we could afford the luxury of being able to sit on our laurels. Not us, not IDNTools. We have a ton of initiatives in the works, and some of those revolve around dropping IDNs.

Before I come on to what is new, let’s just remind ourselves of what is current.

gTLD IDNs drop just like any other domain, and can be caught just like any other domain. IDNs can also be backordered at the popular domain auction houses, just like any other domain.
And lists of dropping IDNs are published just like any other domain – however they are listed in their technical form (punycode), which is impossible to work with, without first undergoing conversion.

For years, the IDNTools droplist tool you see below has been the staple diet of many an IDNer

Listing dropping IDNs in dot COM and NET for the coming 5 days and also for the previous 5 days

• All domains are shown in their punycode and native language, and translated to English.
• Where a domain that shares it’s characterset with other languages (Chinese & Japanese for example), you can also dynamically translate from an extensive list of languages
• A good sign of a good domain is it’s SERP, so naturally all domains are scored based on the popular search engines with the ability to quickly sort the list.
• Another indicator is whether the term returns Google Trends, this can either be viewed by clicking through to Google Trends or by bringing up an on-page Google Trend graph

The very best drops usually end up backordered at Snapnames, but a surprising number of good domains are not backordered at all, and are left for opportunist dropcatchers to keep or to flip on forums.