Nominet shambles

[Admin]

Now fed back by phone to Nominet. Can all go back to our breakfasts. ;-)

Well done.

 

[martin-s]

Worth remembering that the role of an NED is to act as an impartial check and balance, not a yes-man.

See https://www.iod.com/MainWebSite/Resources/Document/roleofnxds_1006.pdf

The first paragraph reads:

Essentially the non-executive director's role is to provide a creative contribution to the board by providing objective criticism.

 

[spiderspider]

Can this go down as a communication issue?? David, you may remember you wrote this in the vote invinsible thread:

From http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/nominet-general-information/133658-vote-invincible-3.html 07/05/15

I am also a supporter of improving communication channels between a wider number of Nominet members and Nominet. I am disappointed that Nominet have failed to appoint a membership communications officer after publishing the potential role two years ago, although I am aware that because of the multiple changes in CCO that post is currently on hold until the CCO position is filled.

I don't wish to see the member selected NED positions on the Nominet board being consistently filled by Nominet members that are from the top ten because if that happens I feel they are likely to steer the company in ways that consistently benefit their interests. That will likely affect the smaller Nominet members like many of you.

Those who have stated they will vote for me, thank you! Those who are undecided, please contact me by email and let's arrange a quick conversation by telephone/Skype/Facetime and you can discuss my candidacy with me and anything else you might like to bring up.

and I also stumbled on this while looking for the above, made I laugh it did

From: http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/nominet-general-information/134061-new-controversy-ies-nominet.html

Do you ever wonder if many of those that now work for Nominet find the activity of managing a domain name registry *alone* simply not enough?

 

[spiderspider]

You'll need to be much more specific and verbose.

lol, no, less words the better

I leave the verbose to you, so we can all go glazed eyed

 

[martin-s]

Ensure you all go right ahead and tell them of your experiences.

Done.

 

[Systreg]

I'm sure I wasn't the only one to give Nominet some feedback on the site design, and in particular the font colour choices used in the online services area.

It's good to see that they've taken that feedback on board and changed the colour scheme, the terrible light blue font colour has gone, and is replaced with a darker colour, which makes everything readable again

 

[Admin]

It's a very subtle change and makes it only slightly better, still a big step back from what was fine and clear. We now have murky and less clear. They don't have a mechanism for checking this type of work, I know because I asked, astonishing huh. The customer services manager said she knew of Acorn Domains but has never visited it, say its all about how much they care about their registrars.

 

[keys]

I agree with Admin. I think Nominet staff provide first class customer services, and the company had a matching and excellent website which we took for granted. The new website is annoyingly inferior, more difficult to use and with weak contrast on important text.

I could ignore the public areas because I rarely need to use them, but to impose even worse contrast in Online Services shows poor judgment. It is like working whilst wearing grey tinted glasses. Web Domain Manager is a necessary and useful tool, and some tasks require much time spent using it. How long would it take to register 100 .uk domains one at a time?

It appears that the person reponsible for this shambles has simply looked at the overall appearance and decided that it matches the rebranding brief, and is therefore satisfactory - it is not! Try using WDM for an an hour or so, if you can endure that long. It is worrying that they were oblivious to the issues before making the changes, and after receiving negative feedback they still prefer style over function, or simply cannot comprehend the problem.

The gov.uk suite are examples of clear well designed websites, with adequate brand identity. I think it is more appropriate for Nominet to follow a similar standard, since they are not a commercial profit driven enterprise. The AD forum is easy to read, and in that respect much better Nominet's WDM.

 

[Admin]

Whilst there is nothing wrong with venting we need to realise that a positive reaction will only happen if Nominet hear of our grievances:

[email protected]

 

[Lovekraft]

Customers i have sold domains to are definitely finding the transfer process far less simple to follow than it was before since the new site. Unfortunately i've lost a couple of high £xxx sales because the client's got fed up trying to complete the process. Not good, never had this problem before and lose 2 sales in 1 week as a result.

And now i have been unable to log into my control panel all afternoon.

 

[ian]

I've had no errors when using the system, but talk about long winded to perform the same duties. I would say the Nominet IT team have made a right dogs dinner of it, but lets face it, chances are they employed a mate through a third party agreement for a significant sum to mess it up. Gotta love how when you go into the Domain Manager option at the bottom you end up with a completely different structure and all the top menus gone! Wonderful!

 

[bluerock]

Customers i have sold domains to are definitely finding the transfer process far less simple to follow than it was before since the new site. Unfortunately i've lost a couple of high £xxx sales because the client's got fed up trying to complete the process. Not good, never had this problem before and lose 2 sales in 1 week as a result.

And now i have been unable to log into my control panel all afternoon.

I also had problems accessing the domain manager to send a transfer email, not impressive.

 

[bluerock]

Was it the port 8443 issue because you didn't make the extra click now required to go from Registrar (Web Domain Manager) to Registrant on the new server or was it another issue? Thanks.

Error code01-151221-143816
Date21/12/2015
Time14:38:16
URI/auth/domainmanager.html

Whatever the above means! working now though.

 

[monaghan]

Customers i have sold domains to are definitely finding the transfer process far less simple to follow than it was before since the new site. Unfortunately i've lost a couple of high £xxx sales because the client's got fed up trying to complete the process. Not good, never had this problem before and lose 2 sales in 1 week as a result.

And now i have been unable to log into my control panel all afternoon.

For that level of loss, why on earth do you not simply setup your own form, grab the details wrap them into a couple of EPP messages and change ownership and transfer out the domain in a matter of seconds?

 

[grantw]

I'm waiting for domain manger to load my domains - currently at 6+ minutes. Web domain manager does it in less than 5 seconds.

This update has been a complete mess, I'm sick of wasting my own time reporting issues to Nominet. The whole thing needs rolling back and starting again in my opinion.

Now at 8 minutes and still loading!!

Grant

 

[grantw]

It's working now, just taking the usual 2-3 minutes to load which is still totally unacceptable!

Windows 7, Chrome and Firefox.

Grant

 

[Lovekraft]

Is he even a registrar because the above is moot if he isn't? If he is (and is self managed) why wouldn't he just use the free transfer button and effect the transfer and tag change himself to avoid the problem? I presumed he isn't a registrar.

Yes that is correct, i should mention i am not currently a TAG holder myself so don't have these options just now. The first failed sale fell through because the transfer kept failing, the page kept timing out. There was issues in the last fortnight with this happening as others reported. The buyer got fed up and walked away, with sales you need to finalise them as soon as possible, one small hurdle can kill it!

The second failed sale, the buyer wasn't very IT savvy at all, i even tried to talk him through the process on the phone, the option to choose to accept a transfer of a domain into an existing account just isn't as clear as it was before, the wording isn't as obvious to someone who isn't rehearsed with the process. The current layout also just makes it less streamlined in my opinion. So he also called it a day.

This hadn't happened before, everyone i sold domains to had no problems at all accepting requests, it was just easy to use where as now it isn't.

 

[Lovekraft]

I'll take another look on the receiving a transfer side of things because I'm curious about what your buyer might have found overly complicated about the new system. I presume your potential buyer wasn't a registrar either so was logging in as a Registrant only?

Out of interest did you refund both potential buyers or do you transfer domain names prior to receiving payment?

Thanks. They weren't registrars, they were registrants and the transfer process was new to them. But the fact i have had non IT savvy people accept transfers without any issues before multiple times proves it was easier to follow before now.

In these 2 cases it was an agreed payment on completion of transfer. Most of the time i take payment beforehand but occasionally some customers don't like this. When this happens I judge each case on it's own merit's as ultimately i want the sale to go ahead of course, but as well don't want to risk having a non payer after i've transferred a domain.

 

[monaghan]

Yes that is correct, i should mention i am not currently a TAG holder myself so don't have these options just now.

If you are selling domains at that sort of value, then why on earth have you not joined Nominet? If your figures are realistic then just 1 of these 2 failed sales would have more than paid for the membership and you'd have had complete control. I'd seriously consider membership if I was you and you can then cut out the middle man completely and EPP directly to the registry systems.

 

[Lovekraft]

If you are selling domains at that sort of value, then why on earth have you not joined Nominet? If your figures are realistic then just 1 of these 2 failed sales would have more than paid for the membership and you'd have had complete control. I'd seriously consider membership if I was you and you can then cut out the middle man completely and EPP directly to the registry systems.

Yep, it's very true. Mostly because i have only recently been investing on a far bigger scale than i used to before so it was never necessary in the past, however evidently i would benefit from doing so at this stage so is definitely on my new years list. I'm familiar with the Nominet registration process having worked and completed the process for companies that had tags in the past so i know how easy it is!

I also miss the convenience of the EPP commands badly, it's fair to say using them in these 2 cases would have avoided them falling through. But still, as it stands, this wasn't actually a problem as a regular registrant until these changes on the site. It's ironic that these negatives may spur me to want to become a member..