regional third-level domains

[Remitur]

Some ccTLD have some reserved regional second-level geographical variants; i.e., for .cn you may have also:

AH.cn (Anhui)
BJ.cn (Beijing)
CQ.cn (Chongqing)
FJ.cn (Fujian)

... and so on, for two-dozen or so.

Others ccTLD may have hundreds, or even thousands of there variants (i.e. .it has a document of 1190 pages(!!!!) of reserved geographic domain names... http://www.nic.it/sites/default/files/docs/Elenco comuni italiani.pdf )

For these domains second level is reserved, but you can freely register a third-level.
I.e.: you can't register firenze.it, but you can freely register singer.firenze.it

Right?

The issue is. how to manage such domains in WHMCS?

The classic way would be:

• configure every single third level in WHMCS, specifying also its price
• configure the whois server
• let's go...

But I wonder. what about a WHMCS install in which you have 20.000 different third-levels, each one with its own prices?

What about a whois.json file, in which a single "extension" command may be long few PAGES?

What the customer experience of a user who is looking for a price in a list price of 20.000 different (mostly unuseful) third-levels?  

 The perfect fix would be that WHMCS looks only for the first-level suffix, leaving all other works to the whois related server (a sort of wildcard for whois and price list)

i.e.: if a customer inserts singer.firenze.it , firenze.it, fake.singer.firenze.it all th result are passed to rhe nic.it whois, without needing to specify them in price list or in whois.json; and the answer of whois server allow or deny the registration  

I think this at the moment is impossible, and would be needed to implement.

Any idea for a walkaround? For any hook for the registrar module which may intercept the requesto of a user to register any third level, evaluate the request and act as needed to allow or refuse registration?

 

[brian!]

4 hours ago, Remitur said:

(i.e. .it has a document of 1190 pages(!!!!) of reserved geographic domain names... http://www.nic.it/sites/default/files/docs/Elenco comuni italiani.pdf )

what's the URL where the above page is linked from.

4 hours ago, Remitur said:

For these domains second level is reserved, but you can freely register a third-level.
I.e.: you can't register firenze.it, but you can freely register singer.firenze.it

I wouldn't necessarily use the word "freely" in this case, as they'd be residency requirements (e.g you'd need to be a citizen, resident or registered in the EU or one or two other surrounding countries) - these might be even more stringent with regards to 3rd level regional TLDs... also, you'd need to find a registrar that would sell them, e.g a NIC.IT accredited registrar.

4 hours ago, Remitur said:

The issue is. how to manage such domains in WHMCS?

The classic way would be:

• configure every single third level in WHMCS, specifying also its price
• configure the whois server
• let's go...

roll your sleeves up for a long day in front of the domain pricing page!

you could save some time, if these 3rd-level TLDs were going to be priced similarly, by entering one and then duplicating the TLD.

with regards to whois, and if memory serves, .IT is one of the nice ccTLDs that all the sublevels use the same whois server... there are a number of countries that are not so friendly (yes Ukraine I mean you!) where some regions use their own whois servers - with different availability strings.

4 hours ago, Remitur said:

But I wonder. what about a WHMCS install in which you have 20.000 different third-levels, each one with its own prices?

assuming your domain pricing page continues to work after you've added the first 500 TLDs (using Duplicate can get around that though), you'd have to handle bulk pricing updates via the Bulk Pricing Updater, with SQL queries or manually...

you can tell that the TLD section of WHMCS was written when there were fewer TLDs available to register - it was fine for that, but after the explosion of new TLDs a few years back, it's clear that it's now pushing WHMCS to the limits of its capability.

I had hoped that with v8, they might start again from a blank sheet about how to handle large numbers of TLDs... but with them mentioning that the next release is going to be 7.5 and I doubt that will be this year, we're probably looking at Summer 2018 at the earliest for the v8 betas.... with a little thought and effort, WHMCS could be so much better than the nonsense we currently have.

5 hours ago, Remitur said:

What about a whois.json file, in which a single "extension" command may be long few PAGES?

my v7 dev whois.json file is 350kb and 20,000+ lines - and it's not even complete.... dist.whois.json is just over 1,000 by comparison, so it shows how limited it is.

I will be releasing a whois/TLD addon early in the New Year that will, amongst other features, include the complete list of whois servers that WHMCS can use, regularly checked and updated, for v5, 6 and 7... I won't go into details here as it would be against the rules, but I will when the time comes.

5 hours ago, Remitur said:

What the customer experience of a user who is looking for a price in a list price of 20.000 different (mostly useless) third-levels?

then you may be looking at creating a custom price list for a specific ccTLD and it's sublevels... that's an interesting idea that I might look into further, though there's no obviously simple way to do it.

5 hours ago, Remitur said:

The perfect fix would be that WHMCS looks only for the first-level suffix, leaving all other works to the whois related server (a sort of wildcard for whois and price list)

i.e.: if a customer inserts singer.firenze.it , firenze.it, fake.singer.firenze.it all the result are passed to the nic.it whois, without needing to specify them in price list or in whois.json; and the answer of whois server allow or deny the registration  

I think this at the moment is impossible, and would be needed to implement.

so under your rules, what happens if I search for 'brian.se' and 'brian.com.se'? you want WHMCS to go "aahhh it's .se, so i'll send both to whois.iis.se and get the results' ?? if so, that wouldn't work... .se is the ccTLD and .com.se is a CentralNIC TLD - both will use different whois servers... how is WHMCS going to know that unless there is a whois.json (or equivalent) available to it ?

and that doesn't even confront the premium name issue - where whois might say a domain is available, but you only later find that it's available for a premium price (which whois couldn't tell you).

6 hours ago, Remitur said:

Any idea for a walkaround? For any hook for the registrar module which may intercept the request of a user to register any third level, evaluate the request and act as needed to allow or refuse registration?

any registrar module is only going to work for that registrar - so you'd either have to find a registrar that sells all the TLDs you want and write it for that, or write multiple modules for multiple registrars.

personally, i've always liked the idea, previously suggested in another thread, that you could assign Lookup Providers, or standard whois, on a TLD by TLD basis... because currently it's all or nothing... either it uses a single lookup provider for ALL TLDs and you effectively can't sell any TLD that the registrar don't offer, or you use whois for them all and run the risk of hitting lookup limits and being unable to sell premium domains... Hobson's choice.

[Remitur]

4 hours ago, brian! said:

what's the URL where the above page is linked from.

http://www.nic.it/docs/nomi-riservati-dei-comuni-italiani

4 hours ago, brian! said:

I wouldn't necessarily use the word "freely" in this case, as they'd be residency requirements (e.g you'd need to be a citizen, resident or registered in the EU or one or two other surrounding countries) - these might be even more stringent with regards to 3rd level regional TLDs... also, you'd need to find a registrar that would sell them, e.g a NIC.IT accredited registrar.

Looking for nic.it accredited registrar? Here I'm!!!! 

Rules about .it registering are changed: to register an .it domain the registrant is only required to have an address in EU or Switzerland. 

4 hours ago, brian! said:

so under your rules, what happens if I search for 'brian.se' and 'brian.com.se'? you want WHMCS to go "aahhh it's .se, so i'll send both to whois.iis.se and get the results' ??

The rule may be:

• if .se and .com.se have different rules/registrars/rules/prices, configure them separately in WHMCS
• then WHMCS will look always for the "deeper" TLD (i.e. parsing the name starting from the leftier dot)
  If not found, parse to following dot

So if someone try to register brian.com.se , WHMCS will look for .com.se
If try to register brian.se, will look for .se
If try to register a (non-existent) brian.biz.se, will look for .biz.se (which does not exist), so following step is looking dor .se
So WHMCS will look for brian.biz.se in the whois server of .se, and this one will return some kind of error

 

•  

[brian!]

thanks for the link.

17 hours ago, Remitur said:

Looking for nic.it accredited registrar? Here I'm!!!! 

i'll remember that for the future!

17 hours ago, Remitur said:

Rules about .it registering are changed: to register an .it domain the registrant is only required to have an address in EU or Switzerland. 

I know the OpenSRS page says its, EU, EEA, Vatican, San Marino and Switzerland...

17 hours ago, Remitur said:

• if .se and .com.se have different rules/registrars/rules/prices, configure them separately in WHMCS
• then WHMCS will look always for the "deeper" TLD (i.e. parsing the name starting from the leftier dot)
  If not found, parse to following dot

I think the current method is better than your suggestion... if for no other reason than it relies too much on WHMCS using an internal process... as much as possible with TLDs, I prefer to take it out of the hands of WHMCS and use methods that I have full control over - namely a comprehensive, reliable whois file.

17 hours ago, Remitur said:

So WHMCS will look for brian.biz.se in the whois server of .se, and this one will return some kind of error

that's a very bad idea as it leaves you wide open for some one to type multiple 2nd-level TLDs that don't exist, but which WHMCS is now instructed to query the whois server for... that would increase the likelihood of you hitting whois lookup limits for that whois server, having your IP blocked by the registry and losing potential sales to genuine clients when the whois starts showing incorrect results (e.g unavailable when they are available).

if you could do this using a lookup provider, then whois lookup limits become irrelevant... and lookup providers will be the future solution to all this, but that's years away... actually, I thought it was years away with v6 and i'm not sure how much closer we are to that day.