At 10/22/01 8:27 PM, Charles Daminato wrote: >We will remove a domain from hold in order for the domain to be transfered >away from us - we're not into holding domains hostage.
Can we remove the on-hold behavior entirely? There's no reason for it unless we're trying to be like NSI. The way customers find out about the lock is by attempting a transfer while it's locked, and their first attempt fails. That is a form of holding domains hostage (it's human nature not to want to write to a company you're ceasing doing business with to ask them to, in effect, do you a favor and let you cancel; people forced to do so become irrationally angry). Also, I had a customer who told me the day before expiration that he was going to renew a domain somewhere else. I wrote to OpenSRS support to ask that the lock not be put on, but I was told that they could only remove the lock after the domain actually expired (which was still six hours in the future), and that I'd have to write back the next day. I did, but then of course it took 24 hours for support to respond to my message. So there is a 24 hour period where a customer's transfer attempt will always be rejected no matter how hard I try, leading to unhappy (ex-)customers. I can think of no legitimate reason for the lock. I believe the theory was that a customer would attempt a transfer, get rejected due to the lock, and write to the reseller, who could then perhaps talk the customer into staying. Whoever thought of that apparently doesn't deal with customers much: the first message from the customer in that situation usually takes the form of "What the f*** are you doing blocking my transfer, you stupid a*******". From there, it's hard to get them back onto the subject of giving you money. If the customer is far enough gone that he's already signed up with another registrar and the transfer is in process, no amount of sweet talk is going to help. Let them go, without making me do more work and potentially angering someone. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies Put an animated US flag on your Windows desktop: http://deskflag.com/
