It’s been all fun and games in the world of domain names recently. For me anyway.

On a positive note, I have been busily adding to my domain name portfolio. My biggest purchase of late was twins.co.uk which I paid £1,000 for and I’ve picked up dozens of others along the way too, including onlineentrepreneurs.co.uk yesterday (I thought it might help support the Internet Entrepreneurs website it now redirects to).

The biggest downer of late has to be the demise of Deleting. It was a fantastic free website that provided lists of UK domain names whose registrations had been suspended and were due to be released (or “dropped”). It was invaluable to a lot of people who buy and sell or buy and develop domain names, including myself.

The website was the brainchild of Andrew Bennett and had become a favourite haunt of domainers since its launch in August 2003. However, following a single complaint to Nominet, the body responsible for the registration of all .uk domains, Deleting was found to be in breach of contract, in that “You may not provide more than an insubstantial part of the (UK domain) register information to a third party or end user”.

I can fully understand Nominet wanting to protect their rights, but it was the heavy handed manner in which Deleting was closed down that surprised me. After all, it was no secret. It was widely advertised in domain circles and must have been known to Nominet for some time.

So why the sudden need for such draconian action?

Why not simply point out to Andrew that he was breaking the terms and conditions of using Nominet’s data and then work with him to allow Deleting to continue within the rules?

As I said over at Internet Entrepreneurs, let’s hope common sense prevails and Nominet does just that.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is an increase of late in what looks like shill bidding - where a seller bids for their own domain name, either directly or through others. It’s easily done in forums where most bids are done via personal messages and it’s the easiest thing in the world to say you’ve received a bid when you haven’t in an attempt to bring others in at higher amounts.

The problem is that although you may suspect shill bidding, you can never be sure. When in this position, you really have to make up your own mind what a domain name is worth to you and offer that amount. If you get it all well and good, but don’t be tricked into going above that amount while caught up in the excitement of the chase.

I’ve compiled a list of 50 domains that all apparently had bids in recent forum sales, but which attracted no further offers. I’ll take a look at it again in a month or so to see if any of the domains have actually changed hands. My gut feeling is that none of them will have.