.co.uk domain transfers not working properly

[daveb1]

Hi All,

 

I'm setting up WHMCS at the moment, and I've run into a problem. I've just placed a new test order with my system and selected "I want to transfer my domain". The domain in question is a .co.uk domain which expires in May 2009. The system however seems to want to renew it from today... the email I got was as follows:

 

*****************

 

Thank you for your domain transfer order. Your order has been received and we have now initiated the transfer process. The details of the domain purchase are below:

 

Domain: domain.co.uk

Registration Length: 2 Year/s

Transfer Price: £0.00 GBP

Renewal Price: £20.00 GBP

Next Due Date: 18/04/2010

 

****************

 

How do I stop this happening?

 

Surely the system should check renewal dates, and if more than 60 days in the future just add it to the account rather than trying to renew it?

 

Also, another question... my choosing the Transfer option, is it an automated process of some kind that the system initiates a transfer from the customer's old registrar to the one I've set up in WHMCS (Enom in this case)? I had an email (as the admin now rather than the customer) saying

 

"The order placed for domain.co.uk has received its first payment and has been automatically submitted to the registrar"

 

What actually happens in this scenario?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Dave

[chickendippers]

Yes, .uk support is somewhat lacking.

 

The admin email you received means the transfer order has been sent to eNom (if you check your pending transfers in eNom it will be listed there).

[daveb1]

Thanks for the reply.

 

So what happens then? Do I just cancel it at Enom? The customer shouldn't get an email saying it's renewed for 2 years from this date, and that's plainly wrong! Apart from anything, there's no mention of changing the IPSTAG, so the transfer will fail anyway.

 

I see you're in the UK... how do you deal with this sort of scenario?

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[chickendippers]

Why would you cancel it at eNom? Unless you don't want the transfer to go through, in which case the test mode is more appropriate.

 

I have added links to our knowledgebase in the transfer initiated email with instructions on how to complete a domain name transfer. This includes things like unlocking the domain and ensuring the whois email address is up to date for normal domains. For .uk domains it instructs them to change the IPS tag.

[Matt]

The system cannot retrieve a renewal date for a domain that's not with a registrar it has any access to. Any date checking must be done manually following the order.

 

The request to Enom doesn't need cancelling, but either in a follow up email or in an addition to the transfer confirmation email template that gets sent out automatically, you do need to say "If you are transferring a .uk domain to us, you will need to update the IPS tag to be XXXXXXXX"

 

Matt

 

EDIT: chickendippers beat me to it!

[netearth]

Hi Matt,

 

Sure you can check, just do a WHOIS on the domain and grab the output part :

Renewal date: 29-Dec-2009

 

And create a table with the months in, so it can be put back to numeric ??

 

Cant say how hard that would be, but thinking outside the box

 

Chris

[othellotech]

Sure you can check, just do a WHOIS on the domain and grab the output part :

Renewal date: 29-Dec-2009

Whois data is not always correct, or even consistent across whois servers.

 

The dates on the domain with the registry *might* not be when you want to charge the client - we moved a lot of domains from OpenSRS to enom - whch of course added a year, and in some cases multiple years - the cients still owe us for those renewals...

 

Dropping a "to-do" item for "check this transfer (date) domain" would be wonderful

 

I thought the "attempted renew" on transfer of .uk had been fixed - but it appears not.

 

There are numerous tld's where transfers dont "add years" - .uk, centralnic .web.com, .gb.net etc and so on - needs to be an option as part of the domain tld setup/config

[netearth]

Hi OT,

 

When I suggested using the WHOIS service, I meant use the registry WHOIS servers, there is no point using any other, certainly for .UK, and I can almost (repeat almost) state that the nominet whois service will always be "up to date" and correct.

 

Chris

[othellotech]

When I suggested using the WHOIS service, I meant use the registry WHOIS servers, there is no point using any other, certainly for .UK, and I can almost (repeat almost) state that the nominet whois service will always be "up to date" and correct.

I've known it not be correct for days on end, and it still isn't *necessarily* when you want to have the customer think the domain expires...

But I can understand your reasoning, I've been working on a "reality check" for our WHMCS

- copies all the domains in tblsdomains into xrefdomains with "inwhmcs" set to Y

- reads nominet.txt (saved from a month:all list result) into xrefdomains with "inregistrar" set to Y (updates existingrecords if exist, adds if dont) sets regexpiry = renewal due date

- reads enom.csv (simple dump of all our enom domains) into xrefdomains with "inregistrar" set to Y (updates existingrecords if exist, adds if dont) sets regexpiry = expirydate

(still to o the other 19 registrars we use, but teh principles the same)

 

list all those where inwhmcs = y and not at a registry to manually check why

list all those at a registry not in whmcs to add

list all those with different expiry dates to decide which is correct

 

its a work in progress, I also want to check that the regitry in whmcs is the regitry actually used for the domain, I get a daily list of those where nextdue and expiry are different to manually fix,

 

need to add some checks for all domains using our nameservers , that they are actually in our nameservers etc

 

it was *very* scary running it for the first time and getting 30 pages of mismatching data

[daveb1]

Hi Rob,

 

That sounds a great idea. Would you mind sharing the script/code for your "reality check"?

 

Cheers

 

Dave

[othellotech]

will do, once it completely works, and i've had a change to remove/mask/parameterise all th e passwords and proprietory stuff out of it.