I am very interested in the topic; I've gotten few common names over the years this way: "server", "@server", "translate", "files", "swear", "react-test", etc.

I am very interested in the topic; I've gotten few common names over the years this way: "server", "@server", "translate", "files", "swear", "react-test", etc. In the vast majority of cases, I instead contacted first the previous maintainer, and in all cases (except one IIRC) they agreed they had basically abandoned the package and readily agreed to transfer them. A couple of them had some extra soft conditions like technical opinions, but these were fairly decent so I followed them. I went ahead and wrote a whole article on the topic, including my tips to identifying what kind of packages were ideal for a polite request, which is always preferred to a hostile takeover like in this twitter thread IMHO: https://francisco.io/blog/getting-a-great-npm-name/ https://francisco.io/blog/getting-a-great-npm-name/ I'm sad to see npm giving up on these, because in the 10+ years it has existed there is definitely space for squatting and greatly named abandoned packages.