New domain availability anomaly

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  placonundrum · Member · May 30, 2009 at 10:43 pm

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  I have a friend who wants to start a blog with a certain name, let’s call it hername.wordpress.com.
  She looked up that name by entering it as a URL on her laptop, and found it to be free: she was presented with the registration form,
  http://en.wordpress.com/signup/?new=hername
  with one of the fields populated already with “hername”. After entering passwords, etc, the form told her that the name was already in use, so she asked me to help. I tried exactly the same procedure on my own computer, and found the name was free, so I registered it.
  Sadly I was logged in under my own login at that moment, and so the domain “hername…” now belongs to me!
  OK, the ownership is not a problem, because she is my friend, but how come I was able to take the name when she had been told it was taken?

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  thesacredpath · Member · May 30, 2009 at 10:56 pm

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  You can transfer it to her, but you will have to contact staff to do that at http://support.wordpress.com/contact/ .

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  placonundrum · Member · May 31, 2009 at 10:09 am

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  Thanks for the reply. I’m not bothered about transferring the blog, because each blog can have a separate password. I’m more interested in solving the name availability anomaly, in case it happens to me one day. Does WordPress have a directory of blog names to check, similar to ‘WhoIs’ for web domain names?