Is Nominet's new ban on renewing expired domains driving you mad!??

[Jon6555]

Nominet has very recently introduced a new procedure that bans renewal of expired domains as much as 2 or 3 days before their expected drop date!

This means if you decide to renew say a day before it's due to drop you'll get a 'not renewed for reason: V194 Operation blocked by Nominet process' error.

Not only is this mightily inconvenient, It's also totally illogical that I'm unable to renew my domain even while I still legitimately own it.

If I were to lose a domain due to this I think I would have a good case to argue in court that Nominet have effectively robbed me of my domain.

ATM Nominet are manually enabling such blocked domains to be renewed on a case-by-case basis (you need to email or call them), but this has just happened to me on Sunday early AM (this particular domain is due to drop today sometime) so I expect there's a good chance I may lose this one and will have no opportunity to renew!

I've already complained multiple times about this but they are sticking to their guns that this new policy is one that was always meant to have been implemented right from the start so is not up for reversal.

I know this is affecting and irritating the hell out of many registrars and it seems to me Nominet are still not listening to their members no matter what they've been trying to suggest recently!

 

[CatchDrop]

Interesting poll, look forward to seeing the results.

There was a forum post yesterday highlighting that a member could only renew domains dropping the next day up until 10pm the night before. Obviously two hours later an unrenewed domain could drop randomly at any time.

The change hasn’t affected me yet because I tend to renew earlier in the day before or a few days prior to dropping.
However as a dropcatcher it is useful to know which domains will drop so that quota is not wasted.

Members for some time have also been pressuring Nominet to enforce their dropcatching policies, so it is interesting if this is the actual policy and how it would be possible to reverse or change the policy.

 

[CreativeMix]

The renewal of your domain is 91 days overdue so sorry but you need to look closer to home on this.

From Nominet's website

• It is possible to renew all domain names until they are “scheduled for cancellation”. Domains are “scheduled for cancellation” AFTER the 90th day, post expiry
• Domains are dropped at random on the 92nd day, post expiry

 

[Siusaidh]

I agree with Matthew that it is actually convenient to know in advance which domains are definitely going to drop and be cancelled. It makes common sense.

Where I think Nominet should be acknowledging a shortfall is in the very poor advance notification about this 'tightening up' and 'enforcement' of the rules. I imagine, as an interim measure, they are being flexible with people if they phone up. But as Jon says, will things get sorted on a Sunday? I'm not so sure.

It's correct to say that they are merely enforcing the rules that have existed for years, but for years they have been 'laissez-faire' about these rules, and so people have taken for granted that as day-to-day practice a registrar can renew a domain, even on the day it is due to drop, providing it hasn't dropped already.

My criticism is that it's unfair to suddenly introduce stricter implementation without contacting all members pretty well in advance and - perish the thought - ask for feedback on the proposed tightening up. It's the communication that, in my view, has been poor and I'm raising that on Friday at the UKRAC meeting.

 

[CreativeMix]

I fell fowl of this on Friday afternoon, rang Nominet, got angry, ranted and was promised a call back from senior support staff which gave me time to read the rules and reflect. Top and bottom is you own your own shit and if you wait till the 91st or - worse still - 92nd day to renew a name you need to look in a mirror when looking for someone to blame.

 

[Siusaidh]

I fell fowl of this on Friday afternoon, rang Nominet, got angry, ranted and was promised a call back from senior support staff which gave me time to read the rules and reflect. Top and bottom is you own your own shit and if you wait till the 91st or - worse still - 92nd day to renew a name you need to look in a mirror when looking for someone to blame.

I agree Sean, and indeed I prefer the clarity that tighter enforcement provides, but I think people get into habits. If you're led to believe, by common practice over the years, that the Day 91/92 rule is flexible - because it doesn't get enforced - then people start to operate on that understanding. 'Oh, Nominet allow us in practice to renew domains right up to the actual drop day'.

So I think that more communication in advance - that enforcement was going to be tighter - would have been helpful.

All that said, 'Pending Delete' and a kind of quarantine buffer zone that clearly informs which names will definitely delete... I think that is bound to be coming, along with Nominet-published droplists.

I'm in favour of 'Pending Delete' period of up to 5 days, just for the sake of clarity. I'm interested in what others think.

 

[Siusaidh]

I asked Barbara Bellis (Nominet) about the renewal cut-off time. She was in a members' meeting today.

She says the cut-off time, after which renewal gets blocked, is now: at the conclusion of 90 days, at the same time the domain was originally registered.

I'm not sure if they're still operating an interim provision, if you miss that cut-off time and phone them up.

But exactly (to the minute) the conclusion of the 90th day, and renew is blocked. So that doesn't mean midnight for all domains. It means whatever time they are recorded as having been registered at.

Check this for yourself if you want to be sure, because I'm not 100% certain I got this right from what she said, and I'd hate anyone to lose a domain. But I think this is what she told us.

 

[ukbackorder]

Lots of 'er' and 'um' in all her answers. She contradicted herself as well. First she said at midnight on the 90th day then she said at the same time as registration on the 90th day - so if you registered at 5pm the domain could only be renewed until 5pm on the 90th day. Considering she was technical she didn't seem to have a very good grasp on their systems and could always fall back on 'that's not my decision' or 'that's not my department'. My advice is to get written confirmation from nominet or to start renewing on the 89th day

 

[Siusaidh]

I'm certainly not leaving my renewals until the 90th day!

(But I don't need to worry about domain renewals for the next 2 years after the recent promotion.)

 

[xdnet]

Not quite the clarity I'd hope to see from the sounds of it.

Disappointing as we really do need precision, if only for how retail registrars configure their systems to allow renew orders to be placed.

It's really not ideal if you end up with a customer renewing a domain in good faith to have it fail at the registry.

 

[bluerock]

Bottom line is if you value your domain and wish to retain it then don’t play games with the renewal process to maybe delay invoices or raise interest in it and just click renew !

 

[webber]

Update from Nominet: https://registrars.nominet.uk/system-announcements/21st-september-2021-renewal-change-notice/

21st September 2021 – Renewal Change Notice
We wanted to make all registrars aware of a change to system behaviour that will affect registrars that send renewal commands more than 90 days after the expiry of a domain name. Recent scheduled maintenance activity included a clean-up of code that now means that if a renewal request is submitted once a domain is scheduled for cancellation, error code v194 will be returned and the renewal will fail.

This is the intended behaviour for the .UK domain lifecycle, which provides a 90 day window post domain expiry, in which to renew a domain name (30 days plus an additional 60 days during which the domain name is suspended). For clarity, renewals are permitted until the end of the 90th day post expiry – this is linked exactly to the time the domain was registered/expired, so the “end of the 90th day post expiry” will vary between domain names. Please use the domain:info EPP command to determine the time and date of registration/expiry.

We would like to apologise to our registrars for not giving appropriate notice of this change.

To avoid any risk to the safe processing of a renewal, please ensure all domains that you wish to renew on behalf of a customer or on your own behalf are processed BEFORE the 91st day post expiry.

Until the end of October we will do our best to support registrars with the manual renewal of a domain name on day 91 – please contact our customer care services team on +44 1865 332233 or via [email protected] during office hours (Mon – Fri 8am-6pm). Ensuring renewal requests are processed on or before day 90 is the best way to ensure a domain name is renewed.

Note the "We would like to apologise to our registrars for not giving appropriate notice of this change."

The info in this post however is not quite accurate: domains can still be renewed in day 91 before the EPP code serverRenewProhibited is applied
Despite all that, yesterday multiple domains were renewed on the day of the drop (day92)