How to see common ENS names that have been auctioned?

Question

In the ENS documentation, it says that the "DApp" shows you when common ENS names are being auctioned.

How do the DApp and the twitter bot know what names people are auctioning?

The DApp and the twitter bot have built in lists of common names, drawn from an English dictionary and Alexa’s list of top 1 million internet domain names. They use these lists to show you when common names are being auctioned. We do this because if the app didn’t reveal these names, anyone with a little technical skill could find them out anyway, giving them an advantage over those who don’t have the capacity to build their own list and code to check names against it.

I would like to get a sample of common names that have been auctioned. But can't seem to make sense of how to do so from the documentation. I know how to interact with contracts using the ABI. I'm just not sure what contract "DApp" refers to (the registry, registrar, resolver) or what function to use.

Answer 1

There is no single contract method that would do this for you. You would end up regenerating the work that Etherscan, the twitter bot, and the Registrar DApp have done in order to accomplish this. If you are just trying to get a result, I recommend pulling data from one of those sources.

If you are just curious to learn how to accomplish it, here is a rough outline of one reasonable approach:

1. Scan the chain for some BidRevealed events
2. Collect the set of hash values
3. Generate a lookup table of hashes, from the Alexa top domains and language dictionaries to their sha3 hash.
4. Look up the original name of each hash value from (2) using the table in (3)

You could choose a different event than BidRevealed, with slightly different effects. Be aware that StartAuction will include a bunch of auctions that no one bids on. The registrar Dapp opens decoy auctions to help obscure your real auction interest.