Warning - licence checker reporting licenced installations as not authorised

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

Out of idle curiosity I  put my own site in the licence checker earlier and was rather alarmed when it reported "This domain is not authorized to be using WHMCS"

I raised a ticket and this was their response:-

Thank you for contacting us today.

The license verification page has recently been updated to only show licenses with a “Last Access” date within the last 10 days show as valid.

Accessing your installations admin area and forcing a license update would refresh our licensing servers. To do this, first login to your admin area and navigate to Help > License Information. Then click the 'Force License Update' button.

Please let me know if I can assist you with any further questions or concerns.

Apart from the total invalidity of that change it doesnt actually work as I am logged in every single day

Edited April 13, 2021 by MrGettingRatherFrustrated

[malfunction]

You mean you contacted WHMCS about something in their system that didn't work properly and they gave you bad information?  I'm shocked.  Shocked, I tell you.

For what it's worth I had the same outcome when I tried with my domain.  Or maybe that's just because our lifetime owned license isn't worth anything any longer 😐

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

What I am most concerned about is that any man/woman/being and his/her/its dog/cat/creature can put my domain name in and be given this incorrect information which could result in reputational damage and/or loss of potential customers and partners or more

To publically declare my site as unlicenced because of their shitty coding is totally unacceptable - any Americans could sue for it I am sure, I would recommend someone does ...

[yggdrasil]

I agree, this is completely unacceptable. If someone decides to firewall their WHMCS servers (for security reasons) because they just told owned license holders they will not receive further security updates, WHMCS is now telling the world you are running an unlicensed site which is completely false. It's your right to protect your servers and installations and you certainly can stop any remote connections out to WHMCS while still being in compliance because last time I checked, its an owned license, not a cloud lease.

Edited April 13, 2021 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

16 hours ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

Apart from the total invalidity of that change it doesn't actually work as I am logged in every single day

fwiw, it's showing your domain as valid to me. ✅

it can't be just logging into the admin area - they literally want a forced license reissue occurring every 10 days ?

15 hours ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

What I am most concerned about is that any man/woman/being and his/her/its dog/cat/creature can put my domain name in and be given this incorrect information which could result in reputational damage and/or loss of potential customers and partners or more

it will work the other way too... nobody can publicly (easily) tell whether anyone is using a nulled license - the script will seemingly give the same result whether it's not legit or because a legit user hasn't logged in and reissued the license (and who the hell will know that they now need to in order to keep the public appearance of the license being valid?) - this is ridiculous, but yet somehow no longer surprising.

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

It is showing my site is valid but only because I forced the registration...

They said they are "dialling home" when you log into the admin area, so any firewall rules you have to stop outbound access will also result in your site being show as not authrorised.

It is really unaccepable from multiple angles

1) They are attemting to "diall home" without permissions or notification 
2) Who knows what they are capturing, they are at least capturing your internal IP - my guess is active user count and this is all linked to the recent price changes so that they can identify sudden reductions ...
3) They already have the list of licenced domains in their database
4) They are publicly showing the status of licenced domains as unlicenced

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

Imagine being a company for automation that requires manual intervention under the threat of defamation! 

 

@WHMCS John can you confirm if this is the case for us?

[brian!]

2 hours ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

They said they are "dialling home" when you log into the admin area

they specifically said that ? because your quote from the support reply says something else to me, e.g you manually need to force the reissue... no doubt this will more automated in v8.2, but that's going to be someone else's problem! 🙂

I can still remember the uproar in here (in v6.3 I think) when they introduced, with no warning, the hardcoded remote WHMCS logo image in the admin email footers... you know what the upshot of all those complaints were? nothing.... even if you feature request to get it removed, it gets declined.

the lesson being - if you don't like what WHMCS are doing, or going to do, then walking away might be the best solution... listening is not their strong point and when they've decided to do something, they can turn both deaf and mute. 🙉🙊

[zitu4life]

8 minutes ago, brian! said:

the hardcoded remote WHMCS logo image in the admin email footers... you know what the upshot of all those complaints were? nothing.... even if you feature request to get it removed, it gets declined.

I was thinking these days that a rise price could get them removed those bored hardcoded again as they already provide unbranded license, so I do not see why having it hardcoded again, hope they annouce that they will removed it soon.

Also hope that they make WHMCS cellphone app free 🙄.

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

6 minutes ago, brian! said:

they specifically said that ? because your quote from the support reply says something else to me, e.g you manually need to force the reissue... no doubt this will more automated in v8.2, but that's going to be someone else's problem! 🙂

I can still remember the uproar in here (in v6.3 I think) when they introduced, with no warning, the hardcoded remote WHMCS logo image in the admin email footers... you know what the upshot of all those complaints were? nothing.... even if you feature request to get it removed, it gets declined.

the lesson being - if you don't like what WHMCS are doing, or going to do, then walking away might be the best solution... listening is not their strong point and when they've decided to do something, they can turn both deaf and mute. 🙉🙊

The license verification page has recently been updated to only show licenses with a “Last Access” date within the last 10 days show as valid.

The last access is you as an admin logging in - so yes that can only be a dial home of some sort on admin login.

The reason I needed to force mine was that a developer tried to access the admin site from the wrong URL and that then caused their crappy verification to continue to try and use that invalid URL (it was when a test site was being copied and the admin element was then removed)

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

17 minutes ago, zitu4life said:

Also hope that they make WHMCS cellphone app free 🙄.

Free? HA they already announced intentions to charge when enough are hooked! It's poor overall! Even the abomination smarters made was better 

[brian!]

14 minutes ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

The last access is you as an admin logging in - so yes that can only be a dial home of some sort on admin login.

oh it's always done that.

[bear]

Actually, one of my two shows unlicensed. Generally I stay logged in, but when this showed I logged off then in again. Still fails. 
The other, same deal; stay logged in, it's showing as licensed. Both owned, both have active support/updates on them. 

I'm hesitant to use the "force license check" in admin, since who knows what that will do. 😉

[brian!]

2 hours ago, bear said:

I'm hesitant to use the "force license check" in admin, since who knows what that will do. 😉

I had a similar thought.

[bear]

Support states it just looks for a login to admin once every 10 days, and if it doesn't see one, it gets upset and sends you to the naughty step. 
Thing is, I'm in there every single day. My browser doesn't ask for a new login every day (though WHMCS asks for my pass on nearly every damn page if I'm not actively using it), so what's the problem here? Interestingly, it's the 8.13 version does it,  since the day they said I last accessed it was the day after I upgraded that particular license.

When I mentioned I'm in there all the time, they immediately asked for admin access to "see what's wrong". 
I declined. Support does not have to immediately resort to "you can't fix this, so let us in", IMHO. 

[Sufiyan Shaikh]

On 4/13/2021 at 10:53 PM, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

The license verification page has recently been updated to only show licenses with a “Last Access” date within the last 10 days show as valid.

WHMCS is a automation software as far as I know.
Why is it must to login into WHMCS admin once every 10 days so that license is showed as "valid"?
 

It's WHMCS responsibility to show correct information if I have a "valid" license in their verification tool even if I don't login into WHMCS because "I have automated my hosting business" and for "automation" I am using this software!

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

2 hours ago, Sufiyan Shaikh said:

WHMCS is a automation software as far as I know.
Why is it must to login into WHMCS admin once every 10 days so that license is showed as "valid"?
 

It's WHMCS responsibility to show correct information if I have a "valid" license in their verification tool even if I don't login into WHMCS because "I have automated my hosting business" and for "automation" I am using this software!

In my opinion, it'll be a callback that allows them to get the information needed - anyone showing as invalid should sue them for the lies perpetuated by their pursuit of learning how a computer works or money... one of the two