twincreek (1.Viewing)

Anyone here think they own this domain? If so, I've got some scary news for you.

Honestly, I have no idea. Totally clueless.

It was a longshot that the owner might be on the board...

Right here, and after jumping through hoops, WHC has fixed up their screwup.

What's the history on this, did you own it, let it expire, but it was still somehow on your account in Expired or as a forward on a hosting plan? Something caused their whacky system to somehow assign my transferred domain to your account.

DomainRecap said:

Right here, and after jumping through hoops, WHC has fixed up their screwup.

What's the history on this, did you own it, let it expire, but it was still somehow on your account in Expired or as a forward on a hosting plan? Something caused their whacky system to somehow assign my transferred domain to your account.

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First off, no I'd bet that the root of the problem isn't fixed, although Frank may have rescued one of your domains manually.

I took advantage of that WHC transfer-in discount about 4.5 years ago, transferred in a ton of domains. But I was quickly horrified by their user interface and buggy transfers and invoicing. I promptly moved my domains out when I saw no action to fix any of it. So yes, I transferred them out and later let that domain expire. And when you transferred it back in, it went into my account - rather than the account that requested the transfer and entered the auth code. That's messed up, no?

So obviously it's WHC's shitty domain registrar coding that allowed this to happen. You know how when you transfer domains out of WHC and they don't disappear from your account? Well that's probably the root of the problem. And yeah, that problem has been there for more than 4.5 years. I've complained about it, other people of complained about it, I'm sure anyone who has ever tried WHC has noticed it. And yet today, its still an issue. Literally 4.5 years later. How many domains have been "misplaced" into someone else's account because of this and went un-noticed? Gotta wonder.

I know of two other domains too that don't belong in my account but were placed there a few weeks ago. Kurts.ca and Muldoon.ca. Are either of those supposed to be yours or did someone else lose a domain too?

Sorry for more bad news [notify]FM[/notify], I know it sounds like I'm giving WHC a hard time lately - but I think its justified here. I know you inherited this mess though so I have sympathy. But you should probably look into finding the real owner of those other domains too and removing them from my account. You have my permission to remove them from my account once you find their rightful owners.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I'm starting to address this with an audit to identify any domains that could have encountered the same issue and at the same time, we're looking into how to prevent this going forward.

From personal experience these issues are arising from a coding issue in which the registrar is simply not automatically refreshing their info and not properly updating their domain info on file. The issue lies where the details may be properly displayed with CIRA but incorrectly displayed on their website. Either way…without a proper IT company actually fixing errors it will never get resolved.

rlm said:

First off, no I'd bet that the root of the problem isn't fixed, although Frank may have rescued one of your domains manually.

I took advantage of that WHC transfer-in discount about 4.5 years ago, transferred in a ton of domains. But I was quickly horrified by their user interface and buggy transfers and invoicing. I promptly moved my domains out when I saw no action to fix any of it. So yes, I transferred them out and later let that domain expire. And when you transferred it back in, it went into my account - rather than the account that requested the transfer and entered the auth code. That's messed up, no?

So obviously it's WHC's shitty domain registrar coding that allowed this to happen. You know how when you transfer domains out of WHC and they don't disappear from your account? Well that's probably the root of the problem. And yeah, that problem has been there for more than 4.5 years. I've complained about it, other people of complained about it, I'm sure anyone who has ever tried WHC has noticed it. And yet today, its still an issue. Literally 4.5 years later. How many domains have been "misplaced" into someone else's account because of this and went un-noticed? Gotta wonder.

I know of two other domains too that don't belong in my account but were placed there a few weeks ago. Kurts.ca and Muldoon.ca. Are either of those supposed to be yours or did someone else lose a domain too?

Sorry for more bad news [notify]FM[/notify], I know it sounds like I'm giving WHC a hard time lately - but I think its justified here. I know you inherited this mess though so I have sympathy. But you should probably look into finding the real owner of those other domains too and removing them from my account. You have my permission to remove them from my account once you find their rightful owners.

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Same interface at Canspace and same issue, I was always emailing them telling them domains in my account needed to be deleted. Years later I would still see domains that I no longer owned.

Same interface is now used by Epik for all.ca so do not expect it to be any better.

MapleDots said:

Same interface at Canspace and same issue, I was always emailing them telling them domains in my account needed to be deleted. Years later I would still see domains that I no longer owned.

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Unfortunately, this is an issue that many registrars suffer from, also the ones using other software. As a registrant, I've encountered these elsewhere before.

And yes, some issues stem from the software in use, such as WHMCS which you can see all over the place. From my perspective as a Product Manager for Domains, many of the problems stem from the fact this was originally designed as hosting management software. Domains sometimes seem like an afterthought... WHC recognized all of this and brought me on board to help them bring more importance to domains, but it is a process to get there.

rlm said:

I've complained about it, other people of complained about it, I'm sure anyone who has ever tried WHC has noticed it. 

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I mentioned that here earlier this year:

FM said:

Unfortunately, this is an issue that many registrars suffer from, also the ones using other software. As a registrant, I've encountered these elsewhere before.

And yes, some issues stem from the software in use, such as WHMCS which you can see all over the place. From my perspective as a Product Manager for Domains, many of the problems stem from the fact this was originally designed as hosting management software. Domains sometimes seem like an afterthought... WHC recognized all of this and brought me on board to help them bring more importance to domains, but it is a process to get there.

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I've always liked and respected you Frank, so I'll apologize for being hard on WHC right now. But no offense, that's a _very_ weak excuse to just admit that, yeah we know about the problems, but what the heck, other registrars are just as bad, right?

Seriously. 4.5+ years and counting that I'm aware of and yet the ghosts of domains past are still haunting user accounts. I mean what's more fundamental for a registrar than keeping track of domains?? I guess I just expected better because I was rooting for WHC, maybe because I have guilt over that $2.99 transfer-in deal from so many years ago, maybe because I like you and Emil, I don't know. Its just disappointing and baffling.

Coming from an old-school programmer, this cannot be that difficult of a problem to resolve regardless of any off-the-shelf software that you use. All this data goes into a database. Any hack programmer should be able to write a script to audit the database records looking for anomalies like these misdirected transfers and those ghost domains that always get left in people's accounts. It should then automatically correct any of those recurring problems created by your off-the-shelf software, log all of the actions taken, and then notify programmers and a manager of any unresolved anomalies so they can keep close tabs on anything unusual from the moment it happens. Then run that script in cron at least once per day. I see this as a basic and straight-forward programming issue and it does not have to affect your other front end or back end registrar processes. Call me if you need help.

I like to be open and communicate about things going on as much as possible and am happy to be able to participate here, thank you for this opportunity.

rlm said:

I've always liked and respected you Frank, so I'll apologize for being hard on WHC right now. But no offense, that's a _very_ weak excuse to just admit that, yeah we know about the problems, but what the heck, other registrars are just as bad, right?

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It wasn't meant as an excuse, it was to underline the fact that things may not be as easy as they seem from the outside.

I can only talk about the time that I joined WHC and can only fix things going forward.

But I agree, something like this should not happen and as mentioned above, I have a plan to move forward and to prevent issues like that, as I wrote above.

Having worked with many companies in software development and programmed for a while to, I can just say that while individual problems maybe don't seem that complex to fix, the interaction of different software pieces and the overall complexity of systems (especially those developer 10+ years ago and having grown over 10 years) creates the challenges. I've seen stupid bugs while working with and for other registrars before.

Just to outline how difficult a process like synchronizing deleted/outbound domains can be - especially for a low margin product like domains:

* you have to do with so many different registries, TLDs and providers
* each registry operator has slightly different rules and different ways to inform you of outbound domains (email, EPP poll, not at all)
* trying to synchronize your entire inventory with the registry is a lengthy process that consumes registry connections, and resources on your end and the registry's end...
* I.e. an INFO call for a domain to get most of the relevant info for a domain varies from 1-10 seconds per domain, depending on the TLD.
* building processes that work around any licensed software you may use is a must in many cases,
* but is also guaranteed to lead to issues going forward for example in the case of software updates (which will then take time to fix too)

I'm not saying this should take years, I'm just trying to illustrate that you're maybe simplifying it a bit too much.

Thank you for the offer to help. We've got capable developers that work full-time for us, but we are still hiring:
https://careers.whc.ca/#opportunities
https://careers.whc.ca/job/22/php-web-developer/

[updated: corrected typos, added a sentence to clarify]

PS: [notify]rlm[/notify], we respect and like you too.