The .ORG Production Registry System scheduled maintenance to deploy the .ORG Spanish Language Script for Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) and System Upgrade on 03 March 2007 has been completed as of 19:00 UTC.

Spanish IDNs (not including German, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish) registered between 19:00 UTC, 03 March 2007 and 19:00 UTC, 02 April 2007 (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 02 May 2007 to allow intellectual property interests to file UDRP actions if warranted.

All Legacy IDNs will continue to be unlocked to allow for registrar updates (including Language Tags) or deletions. Beginning on 03 March 2007, during the registrar’s assignment of the Spanish Language Tag (ES), the .ORG system will verify that the Legacy IDN Punycode string meets the corresponding policy profile of the Spanish 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 - Server Hold, Server Renew Prohibited and Server Transfer Prohibited. The domain 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.

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 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.

During the downtime for the deployment of the Spanish language script, all .ORG Legacy IDN domains that have an expiration date prior to 03 March 2007, will have the expiry date reset to 03 March 2007. PIR is resetting the expiry dates of all .ORG Legacy IDNs so as to fulfill our earlier commitment to you of not charging for maintaining Legacy .ORG IDNs.

An FAQ and Registrar Manual detailing the .ORG Spanish IDN is available
at: https://registrars.pir.org/registrar_relations/idn. An optional OT&E environment has also been available beginning 01 February 2007 at 19:00 UTC.

SYSTEM UPGRADES

In addition to the Spanish Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) deployment, the following bug fix is to be promoted in the .ORG production environment on 03 March 2007 between 15:00 and 19:00 UTC.
This fix has been promoted to .ORG OT&E environment on 23 February 2007 between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC.

- EPP_Domain_Check currently shows IDNs with a status of available when these IDNs are in Drop Zone and unavailable. This deployment will include a fix to return the proper unavailable status for IDNs in the Drop Zone when queried against the .ORG SRS.