Please be advised that on 23 January 2010 between 15:00 and 19:00 UTC, the .ORG Production System is scheduled for downtime to allow for the deployment of Chinese Internationalized Domain Names (IDN).
Registrations of the Chinese IDNs on 23 January 2010 at 19:00 UTC will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. During this scheduled downtime, the .ORG Production System including the Web Based Admin Tool and WHOIS will be unavailable. Domains will continue to resolve as normal during this time period.

Chinese IDNs (not including Spanish, German, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish) registered between 19:00 UTC, 23 January 2010 and 19:00 UTC, 22 February 2010 (during the first 30 days of operation) will be placed on Server Delete Prohibited, Server Transfer Prohibited, Server Update Prohibited, Server Renew Prohibited and Server Hold. These statuses will remain in effect until 25 March 2010 to allow intellectual property interests to file UDRP actions if warranted.

All Chinese Legacy IDNs will continue to be unlocked to allow for registrar updates (including Language Tags). Beginning on 23 January 2010, during the registrar’s assignment of the Chinese Language Tag (Traditional Chinese ZH-TW or Simplified Chinese ZH-CN), the .ORG system will verify that the Chinese Legacy IDN Punycode string meets the corresponding policy profile of the Chinese Language Tag in the .ORG system. If this requirement is not met, the Language Tag assignment will fail. Upon valid Language Tag updates, the following statuses will automatically be removed from the domain(s) – Server Hold, Server Renew Prohibited and Server Transfer Prohibited. The domain(s) will then be added to the .ORG Zone File to enable DNS resolution (assuming it meets all other requirements for inclusion in the zone file e.g. minimum NS).

Chinese Legacy IDN domains that are updated with a Language Tag must be updated with « thick » contact data, or risk possible deletion of the domain by the Registry.

Please note that all expired Chinese Legacy IDNs will auto-renew following successful updating of the Language Tag. If a registrar chooses to delete the domain, they must do so within the 45 day auto-renew grace period or prior to updating the Language Tag.
Registrars are encouraged to ensure that adequate funds are available to support these auto-renewals.

All .ORG Chinese Legacy IDNs that have an expiration date prior to 23 January 2010, will have the expiry date reset to 23 January 2010. PIR is resetting the expiry dates of all .ORG Chinese Legacy IDNs so as to fulfill our earlier commitment to you of not charging for maintaining Legacy .ORG IDNs.

Updated Registrar Manual and FAQs detailing the .ORG Chinese IDN were made available to Registrars on Dec 9, 2009.