Dear colleagues, We are happy to announce the deployment of RIPE Database software release 1.82 to the Release Candidate (RC) environment. We plan to deploy this version to production on Wednesday 14 October. This release introduces a number of features on the internal API of the RIPE Database that were needed to support the automatic updating of placeholder objects when resources are transferred into or out of the RIPE region. This release should not introduce any publicly visible changes, but we encourage all of you to test the new release in the RC environment. Note that the previous release 1.81 has not been deployed to production. While testing in the RC environment, we found a number of small issues in the User Interface (UI) that we will fix shortly. Technically the UI is not part of the core whois, but version 1.81 introduces a number of changes to the internal API in support of the new UI. Since that UI is not deployed now, there is no need to deploy 1.81 now either. And to avoid doing unnecessary upgrades of the production environment it was decided to skip this release, and deploy these changes only when 1.82 is deployed. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Kind regards, Trudy Prins Manager Software Engineering RIPE NCC