Roger B.A. Klorese wrote:
So you think that, because of this, it would be preferable for the user to just bingo-bango lose service because of a transfer, unknowingly?
Well, yes, the customer should lose the service. That's what "transfer" means: losing all services from the old registrar. Whether the service is private registration, DNS forwarding, or weekly fresh fruit delivery makes no difference.
Hopefully the customer has done some research, knows what they're losing, and has made sure that the new company provides the same or better for each service that they need.
It's not the gaining registrar's responsibility to show a list of "here's a complete list of services GoDaddy gave you that we don't" on signup. I'm sure that GoDaddy would agree in the reverse situation; they hardly want to be saying "here's what Tiger Technologies was giving you that we don't". That way madness lies. Even a generic "you may lose services" is bad, because inevitably the customer will ask "well, hold on a second -- exactly what will I lose?", which is a question that's impossible for the gaining registrar to answer. The losing registrar has the opportunity to send a separate message with this information if they wish.
The suggestion that "the customer should remove all services before transferring to indicate that they know what they're losing" is also problematic, because it would lead to downtime of services in cases where the transfer would otherwise be seamless because the new registrar provides the same service after the transfer.
Anyway, all this is a bit irrelevant to the discussion at hand. In the cases I'm concerned about, the person who registered the domain name with GoDaddy knows exactly what services he or she is losing and gaining and wants to transfer it anyway, without being forced to jump through various GoDaddy-specific hoops beforehand.
If GoDaddy wants to lock all private registration domain names against transfers, so that gaining registrars can handle the failure as part of their normal "locked domains can't be transferred" business logic, that's fine (extremely annoying, but fine). What I object to is "every registrar has a different extra procedure that needs to be followed to allow transfers". When a customer asks me "how do I transfer a domain name to you?", I need to be able to check that it isn't locked, that it's been registered for > 60 days, and that the customer can read messages sent to the admin contact address, and say "you're all set". Not "well, you'll have to ask your current company what you have to do so that they'll allow it...", which is EXACTLY what the transfer policy was designed to put a stop to.
-- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/ _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
