All of the genereic top level domains (gTLDs) offer the possibility to give a domain the status “Lock”. That protects the domain form being modified in general and from being transferred in particular. This way, you can prevent third parties from taking over domains from your portfolio by means of unintended transfers.

That protection from outgoing transfers can also be achieved with the help of pre-nack, i.e. the automated rejection of transfer requests that you can also set via the DRS. The degree of protection for a locked domain is even higher than what you achieve with pre-nack, though. The exact effect of a Lock may vary from registry to registry. However, basically you can say that a Lock prevents any modification of the domain data except for removing the Lock status.

You can set the status Lock for one or more domains by using the “Change Domain State”-function from the Domains section of the DRS.

Simply enter the names of the domains you wish to protect in the “Domain list”-text area of the form and select “Lock” as the status to be set. You can use the button “--- Select action ---” to decide whether the selected status shall be set or removed for the given domains. By clicking on “submit”, the status of the domains will be updated at the corresponding registry.

You can protect all your productive domains with the lock status very easily by using the Quick Search and the Series Processing of the DRS, provided that the corresponding registry supports the locking mechanism.

• 1. Quick search “productive”
  Go to the Quick search page and use the button “productive”.

• 2. Series processing -> Select all
  On the search result page, click on the “Select all”-symbol that you find in the Series processing menu “floating” on the left hand side of the search result list (see the screenshot depicted below). You can still alter the selection afterwards, of course.

• 3. Series processing -> Change domain state
  If you then click on the “Change domain state”-symbol in the “Operations” area of the Series processing menu, you get to the same form as described above, with the difference that in this case the form is pre-filled with the selected domains.

The handling of the form remains the same as ever. Domains for which the registry does not offer a Lock-function will produce a “The operation could not be completed successfully” error message in the overview of the operation's result.

As reassuring as it may be to have the possibility to protect domains against inadvertent and malicious modifications, the lock status can be quite annoying if you have to frequently change domain data. In each of that cases, the lock has to be removed prior to making the desired changes, just to re-activate it afterwards.

In order not to make these circumstances restrain our P3 partners from actually using the expedient Lock function, we have implemented the “Autounlock” feature especially for the participants in our Premium Partner Program.

If domain modifications are processed via the DRS, the Autounlock function automatically removes an existing lock before changing domain data, if necessary, and reactivates it afterwards without that you have to take any additional action.

If you want to use the Autounlock feature, all you have to do is to activate it via the support of Knipp. Just send an informal mail to support@knipp.de, call us or send a fax. You will then receive a confirmation notice about the activation of the function in written form.