Do this now to avoid a big pain in the future.
Hopefully my U.S. readers are getting ready to enjoy turkey and stuffing right now, but you need to get back to work before the end of the month.
As I discussed on this week’s podcast, a new domain name transfer policy goes into effect on December 1. The key change has to do with registrant transfers rather than registrar transfers. Not taking action before December 1 could result in a big hassle.
Essentially, if you make a change to your registrant name, organization name or email address on a domain once the new policy goes into effect, both the new and old registrant have to approve the change. Even if you make a minor change in which you remain the registrant, you’ll have to click on multiple emails from the registrar to approve the change. Also, unless your registrar provides an opt-out and you select it, these changes will result in a 60-day transfer lock on your domain.
So here’s your homework for the rest of the month: check the whois records on your domain name portfolio to make sure you have accurate information in the registrant fields. Make corrections now while it’s still easy.
godaddy needs to change their transfer in method so whois gets updated to what is on the account. i know i have a number of transfers to godaddy where the buyer never updated the contacts.
From my understanding, they are working on that.
It still baffles me how many people don’t update their whois immediately upon a new inbound transfer/push. It seems that some of it has to do with trying to have free privacy and other situations are investors holding ccTLDs from other countries that require residence. If nothing else, this new policy will not only help with security, it will also help promote better ethics.
As far as I know, some registrars will provide an opt-out, including Uniregistry, Namesilo, I guess GoDaddy is working on that as well.
Godaddy working on providing an opt-out? The company that basically invented this? That’s laughable.
I’m not laughing at you, just the idea of Godaddy doing something that we actually want, haha.
I’ve hated their policies for an eternity now, as many have. Obviously they won’t provide an opt out, unless they have a drastic change to heart, and become a more customer centric company all of a sudden.
That said, I bet UniRegistery and NameSilo will indeed do this. Two good ones. I hope they both stay that way.
What about whois privacy ?
Who’s privacy creates a unique problem that we talked about on the podcast. In particular it could be a problem for privacy services that change their email addresses every month.
What about whois privacy with email addresses that don’t forward correctly? Name.com’s whois privacy emails never seem to forward, for example. Are these domains just unmanageable after the 1st December
Re whois privacy:
So if you simply remove whois privacy to expose your existing whois, does that also result in a 60 day lock? In some cases you can’t even do a transfer unless you first remove it.
With the way the rules are currently written, yes, this would be a 60 day lock. You could opt out, of course.
Wow, that’s a bit like “Catch-22.” Thanks for the heads up. Not finding any opt-out options anywhere yet, though.
Okay, I see apparently the opt-out option is to be provided when making such changes. May not be bad in that case.