According to the schedule that was planed, the AFNIC’s registration chain will change to the « continuous registration » mode on Thursday November 15th.
As reminder, this means that the forms will still be taken into account as it is today but will now also be handled from 4am to midnight. Also, these operations will take place 7 days a week. The domain name publication in the DNS will still continue to be at 6:30pm on working days.
The following step will be to increase the number of publications to 5 times a day, 7 days a week and will take place on Tuesday, November 27th 2007.
The following schema sums the main differences between « Before November 15th », « From November 15th to November 27th » and « After November 27th »:
http://www.afnic.fr/data/divers/prive.isp/ouverture-chaine-enregistrement-afnic.pdf
In addition, the minimum protection system for the deletion operation is already in place:
– A deleted domain name cannot be registered for 24 hours by another registrar.
– It appears available in the WhoIs and in the domain availability tools but if a form is sent the following error will be returned:
[domain_deleted_today].
– During this 24 hours period, the registrar that initiated the deletion request can register the domain name again by sending a creation form (invoiced operation).
Source AFNIC