Whois Settings

The "Whois/Availability" tab in the "Scan Settings" window allows the user to configure whether or not D.R.T. checks Whois as a second method of identifying whether a domain name is registered or not.

The first option, "Check whois to determine registrar...", determines whether or not the whois gets checked at all.

The second option, "Only check whois availability..", will only check the whois if the domain does not resolve. We strongly recommend keeping this option on as it will prevent D.R.T. from getting banned from whois servers fast. International and .org/.us/.info/.biz whois servers tend to ban fast so queries to those servers should be limited.

The advanced availability checking features were added later on in development to ease the process of finding unused domains. The first option, "Analyze web site size..." will attempt to analyze the web site size (ex: small, medium, large, very large) and represent it with a number (S1,S2,S3,S4, where S1 is a site <4000 bytes). The "Cache web site title..." feature will attempt to extract the web site title if one is available and will store it in the proper scan list column (Site Title). The "Highlight domains with under construction..." feature will automatically highlight domains which contain "under construction" or similar text within the HTML page.

The last feature, "Display web site thumbnail..." will display a thumbnail for a given domain pulled from Alexa. At the time of this writing this feature is not yet active and is therefore disabled.