.uk Inbound Domain Transfers

[thisismatt]

Hey all 👋

Nominet has a setting within TAGs to allow automatic transfers of domains to your TAG, or only upon handshake. I assume that this handshake option applies to EPP software (in my case WHMCS).

So my question is does WHMCS allow for the 'polling' of TAGs to check for domains on a TAG and what's configured within WHMCS itself? I haven't seen anything within the options so assume not, but would appreciate thoughts / comments on this before I perhaps raise a request for this.

[inteldigital]

What would be the use case of such a feature? The domains in your WHMCS would all be on your TAG, assuming? Otherwise how are you supposed to control the renewals?

[thisismatt]

1) Someone transfers a domain to your TAG (accidentally, mistype) and you aren't aware until Nominet charge your account.

2) Identifying mismatches between domains you *think* you have and *actually* have

There's two uses straight away. You can have domains on your TAG that aren't in WHMCS; hence my question/suggestion.

[inteldigital]

Interesting. How would you propose this would be implemented? Assuming you'd have to have access to EPP for a start, but then if you're renewing domains through Nominet you'd have to be a member anyway (unless of course you like being financially raped for £80 per domain). But I think this is more of a custom feature, since it's pretty much focusing on the use of Nominet to run through the list of domains in your account with them and list them inside WHMCS. Or am I misunderstanding?

When you have automatic handshake acceptance turned on inside your TAG, you get notified by Automaton every time you have an incoming domain anyway, so unless you're having thousands of these come in every day (which is absolutely possible) you will always know what is happening. You could even code some sort of feature that integrates with your emails to log information from Automaton emails, extract the information from them and list them somewhere you can read them in a formatted sense (an google sheet for example).

[thisismatt]

1 minute ago, inteldigital said:

How would you propose this would be implemented?

I don't know at this stage. You'll note from my original post that it was a query about whether this already can be done, so it's very much a thought at this stage. How it could be executed within the parameters of WHMCS is up for debate (by people way above my pay grade).

3 minutes ago, inteldigital said:

Or am I misunderstanding?

Nope, I don't believe you are. But I don't believe this sort of 'de-duping' is beyond the realms of capability of WHMCS; based on what it already does.

 

3 minutes ago, inteldigital said:

you will always know what is happening

Yes, but things can be missed; we're all only mere mortals.

[inteldigital]

No, I agree. I'm sure it could be implemented into WHMCS, but it would never be implemented by WHMCS themselves, I wouldn't think! You may want to have it custom coded. There's a couple of people on this community that do such things, although one would need experience with EPP, I imagine!

[brian!]

4 hours ago, thisismatt said:

So my question is does WHMCS allow for the 'polling' of TAGs to check for domains on a TAG and what's configured within WHMCS itself?

the option would exist within the API, but WHMCS cannot do this currently.

4 hours ago, thisismatt said:

I haven't seen anything within the options so assume not, but would appreciate thoughts / comments on this before I perhaps raise a request for this. 

I don't want to shatter any delusions here as I know you've already just posted a request on another matter, but generally feature requests can take 5 years for WHMCS to complete... and i'm not saying that 5-year wait is an exception to the rule, it's the norm.

3 hours ago, inteldigital said:

No, I agree. I'm sure it could be implemented into WHMCS, but it would never be implemented by WHMCS themselves, I wouldn't think!

i'd totally agree with @inteldigital here - they could do it (if there was sufficient demand, inclination or $$$ for them), but they won't do it.

3 hours ago, inteldigital said:

You may want to have it custom coded.

I agree with that too... feature requests are all well and good, but even if they get completed, they will take years to ever get to that stage... so they're more for "wouldn't it be nice if WHMCS could do this one day" type ideas... the minute you need WHMCS to do something NOW (or even soon), then you have to throw money at it by getting a developer in... maybe if you caught WHMCS during a beta period and it was a minor tweak, it *might* get done - or apparently having a quiet word at a trade show (which is where some of the recent nonsensical ideas were supposedly born!)... but for something like this, it would likely need a significant number of votes to get considered and it would take years to generate those numbers (and that's assuming that others could even find the request in the first place).

FWIW - even if WHMCS could do this, i'm not sure that I would use it as you can easily use Nominet Online Services to get a list of domains on your TAG(s), export the .uk domains from WHMCS and compare the two - I already do this at the start of each year... I couldn't really do it in WHMCS anyway as I have a large number of .uk domains that aren't included in WHMCS.

3 hours ago, inteldigital said:

There's a couple of people on this community that do such things, although one would need experience with EPP, I imagine! 

the usual suspects who rear their heads only when you post in Service Offers & Requests? 😛

and before you ask, this is not a project for me Matt! 🙂

[thisismatt]

47 minutes ago, brian! said:

and before you ask, this is not a project for me Matt!

😂 What are you trying to suggest?! lol