A couple of weeks ago we posted a US$1,000.00 contest for best suggested feature for DNZoom. Today we’d like to announce the winner, and our thoughts on the best suggested feature.

A note from Dan Kimball of DNZoom by Bido:

We¹d like to announce the winner of the Bido feature contest. Ravi Venkatraman is the winner with the submission for a “Domain Custodial” feature.

This feature is something that all domainers think about from time to time, but most don’t think to act upon. In the event of your passing, will your loved ones know what to do in order to take over your domains? Even if they could take over your domains, would they know what to do with them? Since most domainers don’t have any type of formal life estate planning on their domain names, this is something that our industry should pay attention to. We at DNZoom often look at drop lists and think to ourselves “That name was really awesome, no one in their right mind would have let it drop.” Sad to say, but we surmise that at least a few of the great names that drop probably were once the property of someone who has since passed. We can only guess, but sometimes the kin of those deceased probably were not aware of the value of the domains and then let the names expire, only to lose thousands or more due to the uneducated heirs of the estate.
After speaking with a number of industry professionals, I find myself more prepared than most. Obviously I trust my wife with my assets, but in reality I know that she would not know what to do with my domains if I did passed away. Because of this, Sean Stafford have come up with a way to take care of one another should something happen to either of us.
Both of us have devised a spreadsheet with all of the registrar and parking accounts that we own along with the usernames to each. Since the passwords are always changing, there is no point in listing the passwords on said spread sheet. Instead, we have passwords for our email accounts.
We list about 30 different passwords for our email account and whenever we change the password to these, we choose one of those 30. Of those, one of the passwords will get in our email, and from there we are able to resend the password for each of the domain registrar/parking accounts to this email address. Since we have access to the email address, we now have access to the domain/registrar accounts. We each keep the spreadsheet in a place that the other would know about. We also keep instructions as to what is to happen. To sum it up, upon Sean’s passing, I would liquidate all of his names and collect all of the parking payments and then distribute the funds to his family. Upon my passing, he would do the same for me. (For more information about this, you can check out Sean’s ebook, domaingraduate.com, where he details this. As far as I know, he was the first person to actually bring to light this as a concern in a learning resource for new domainers. He dubs it, “domain estate planning”.

No one, and I mean no one, wants to talk about death or the possibility of dying. However, it is something that you need to take care of and discuss with your loved ones. Just because you have an insurance policy, a will, an executer, or anything else, doesn’t mean your domains are not going to drop.
While we would never want any of our clients to pass away, we understand that is part of reality. We hope to have a feature (more likely an entire program built within DNZoom), that will accommodate for this. We all knew the need previously, but now that this has been requested we do feel that it would be of great benefit to our users.
Once Bido is launched we will begin devising a plan to get this implemented. We think that this will not only help to serve you, but help serve your loved ones in a case where you are not here to serve them yourself.

All the best!

Dan Kimball

Coincidently, a blog reader left this comment yesterday on a related post:

Well, Sahar, better advice was never given. Three weeks ago, recently semi-retired from my day job, I was looking at Pompano and LHP water properties and feeling very out of breath. Two tests later and I was on a plane to Mayo Clinic Rochester for open-heart surgery for mitral valve repair. In the intervening day I assembled lists of:

Excell listings of my domain holdings annotated with development status.
User id and passwords for all domain, hosting, and parking accounts.
Details of pending site auctions.
Bank account numbers and access codes.

I mailed one copy to myself at home, handed one to my wife with isstructions to give to my son, and was wheeled to the OR.

I had previously obtained recognition from my son as to my general domain-investment objectives. (Bonus: IT is his strength, and we are now begining to work jointly on several of the sites.

The classic will would just not have fit the situation. Thanks for the push, Sahar.

If you have any other feature requests for DNZoom, things you may already do manually, or maybe things you’d like to have that do not yet exist, please leave a comment here. We’re here to serve.

Cheers

Sahar

Read the complete post at http://www.conceptualist.com/fedclick.php?ref=http://www.conceptualist.com/2008/04/15/contest-update-and-the-best-dnzoom-suggested-feature-is/&id=1915