Secret Drops?

[Grego85]

Hey Pro's,

So last night Online.TV dropped (and of course I failed to catch it). I lost out to some big outfit that just merged with name.com. The problem was I had to settle for mashing instead of a backorder because the name wasn't showing up on backorder lists. According to the whois the name moved into pending delete about 12 days earlier than it should have. The only reason I even realized it was dropping is because I happened to write down the expiration date a long time ago when I searched for it, and thought I better check up on it. glad I did, but needless to say I went to bed late and really pissed off last night!

My noob question: are some drops kept secret on purpose to allow a certain entity to schwoop on it without competition?

 

[Kate]

It's quite simple.
Some TLDs release droplists, or at least the zone files. Then you can easily see what is going to drop.

The .tv registry does not release their zone file, and to my knowledge they don't publish droplists either. But there is always a possibility that the registrars have data that is not public.
So you have to build your own lists, with expiry dates and keep track of renewals. What you in fact did.