New domain expiry process and droplists for .uk

[Ben Thomas]

This whole affair is sordid and really only benefits the people directly involved with Nominet in some way, or has some sort of influence with people involved.

All we can do is make some noise about it at the AGM @ian

 

[webber]

This whole affair is sordid and really only benefits the people directly involved with Nominet in some way, or has some sort of influence with people involved.

All we can do is make some noise about it at the AGM

While I don't agree with the sentiment (tags DOMAINLOREM, CDAVIES, YOMOGO, CTRL-ALT-DEL which are doing really well on the new system do not have any involvement with Nominet as far as I know), I do welcome more engagement at the AGM and anything else to do with Nominet.
For example, it was very disappointing at the DLIWG roundtable when wider feedback was sought on the implementation of droplists, that I could count those attending on my fingers (excluding Nom staff and UKRAC)

 

[ukbackorder]

We knew the UKRAC was a waste of time. Sadly some people bought into it, Simon sold out, and thus stopped the complete restructuring of nominet. The clue was always 'advisory'. Totally pointless. They give you lip service a few hours every 6 months and then ignore whatever you said. Meanwhile you placate the masses for them. We've got a NED for that.

 

[Ben Thomas]

We knew the UKRAC was a waste of time. Sadly some people bought into it, Simon sold out, and thus stopped the complete restructuring of nominet. The clue was always 'advisory'. Totally pointless. They give you lip service a few hours every 6 months and then ignore whatever you said. Meanwhile you placate the masses for them. We've got a NED for that.

Totally agree. Not sure what happened with Simon to be honest, I have spoken with him on occasion via email for unrelated projects, maybe I'll reach out and ask him what happened.

 

[impact]

We knew the UKRAC was a waste of time. Sadly some people bought into it, Simon sold out, and thus stopped the complete restructuring of nominet. The clue was always 'advisory'. Totally pointless. They give you lip service a few hours every 6 months and then ignore whatever you said. Meanwhile you placate the masses for them. We've got a NED for that.

Yes complete waste of time this has changed nothing nominet dont care the meetings are a waste of time they will never change.

 

[xdnet]

I'm sure my other colleagues who are on this forum (@rob, @xdnet) can confirm this.

I can confirm, there's certainly no secret sauce being discussed in our meetings - and we (All UKRAC and Nominet) are all very vigilant on conflicts like this. I'm confident we would ensure if/when Nominet does choose to share any of the data about drops, which _may_ provide insights, it would be published to all members.

I'll go so far as to pledge to object firmly if I thought any of my UKRAC colleagues was gaining an advantage through information shared to the UKRAC - I trust they are skilled, knowledgable and otherwise well informed enough to know how to compete without needing Nominet giving them some kind of insider help (why on earth would Nominet or the non-drop catching councillors want that anyway!?).

I'm not a board member/NED, just a poor old councillor in the UKRAC

NEDs renumeration is on a rather different scale to the UKRAC as well
(thankfully we have less responsibility to worry about though)

This whole affair is sordid and really only benefits the people directly involved with Nominet in some way, or has some sort of influence with people involved.

We knew the UKRAC was a waste of time. Sadly some people bought into it, Simon sold out, and thus stopped the complete restructuring of nominet. The clue was always 'advisory'. Totally pointless. They give you lip service a few hours every 6 months and then ignore whatever you said. Meanwhile you placate the masses for them. We've got a NED for that.

I find it rather curious that in this thread the UKRAC apparently is both massively influential and able to persuade Nominet to pass us insider information to have an unfair advantage, and also apparently useless and wasting our time trying to help make better .UK policy for all members?

I can only tell you that I know that my colleagues who drop catch have been doing so for a very long time, and I'm sure have their own knowledge on how to best do what they do - In fact I think @webber has been quite generous in sharing some of his methods when others choose to remain silent on their tactics - I honestly can't think of a single thing which has been shared with us which could give even a vague hint towards optimising their catches. Maybe they do know some secret sauce, or some clever optimisation which some others aren't aware of, but they most definitely did not learn it through their UKRAC involvement.

Also we are aiming to meet every 1-2 months now, not every 6 months. Every single time a member has spoken to me about an issue they have, I have made it a paper and change has occurred (or is underway).

If you're not happy with something, which is actually tangible and can be fixed with policy, please do reach out and talk to us. We can propose papers and try to work out how the current policies can be improved to better serve members. We can't do this without solid input and ideas from other members.

 

[ukbackorder]

Nobody said it was influential. Why would they? I actually said when people bought into it that an *advisory* committee, so long ago now it seems, would have no say beyond nominet making people feel they 'are listening' and to stop the imminent removal of the entire board. I see nothing to disprove that. But hey if your meetings make you feel like you're getting your points across (before nominet do what they were going to do anyway because they themselves said an *advisory* committee would have no power) - go for it.

 

[xdnet]

Nobody said it was influential. Why would they? I actually said when people bought into it that an *advisory* committee, so long ago now it seems, would have no say beyond nominet making people feel they 'are listening' and to stop the imminent removal of the entire board. I see nothing to disprove that. But hey if your meetings make you feel like you're getting your points across (before nominet do what they were going to do anyway because they themselves said an *advisory* committee would have no power) - go for it.

I was referring to Ben's post I quoted above yours which seemed to imply that one or more members of the UKRAC was successful in drops because of their UKRAC involvement which is simply not the case from everything I have seen.

I would also note, we may be advisory, but so far I don't think the board has rejected a single recommendation we have made. We have made progress. And frankly, if we were 'executive' I suspect we'd have a lot more people accusing us of somehow setting the rules for our own advantage.

I will give you sometimes it's more of a battle than I'd like... and honestly, yes, there are one or two issues where Nominet has seemed to become rather deaf to the points we're making and more fool them for failing to take advice from elected member representatives...

But I'm not pretending it's perfect, nothing is, but an awful lot *has* changed for the positive since the EGM and I will gladly defend the positive impact we have been able to make in the UKRAC, and refute the idea something 'sordid' is going on due to our positions. (I know you didn't say that @sigh I'm just commenting on why I felt the need to reply here in general).

 

[Systreg]

I find it rather curious that in this thread the UKRAC apparently is both massively influential and able to persuade Nominet to pass us insider information to have an unfair advantage, and also apparently useless and wasting our time trying to help make better .UK policy for all members?

Reminded me of this

 

[Ben Thomas]

Really cool story, thanks. But as far as influence goes, what's stopping people inside UKRAC (which is closer to Nominet and it's peers than anyone outside of UKRAC) from networking, forming friendships and sharing information? Essentially "colluding" outside of virtual means?

You coming here to this forum to defend UKRAC, for me, also throws a red flag. Secondly, what on Earth has UKRAC being useless got to do with the fact that UKRAC members have more involvement with Nominet than an average drop catcher?

I won't wait for your reply, as if I am to base your response on the usefulness of UKRAC meetings gone by I'll be waiting forever for anything to happen.

 

[xdnet]

I've said my piece, I decided to reply because while I understand there's confusion and frustration around this issue I simply don't think it's fair to tarnish my colleagues integrity, nor that of the UKRAC with baseless accusations of impropriety.

If you really think there's some advantage to be gained then please feel free to run next year, I can assure you, you'll be very disappointed on that front. It's just a lot of work, compromise, and then finally end up with posts like this.

I would suggest it's more constructive to consolidate your concerns, observations, data et el like @webber did on the Nominet Community thread.

 

[Ben Thomas]

I didn't tarnish anybody's integrity, I mentioned zero names. In fact, I didn't aim what I said at UKRAC at all. I said:

This whole affair is sordid and really only benefits the people directly involved with Nominet in some way, or has some sort of influence with people involved.

You came and defended UKRAC on that basis?

 

[xdnet]

Based on the context of the thread that was the implication from what I read, if it wasn't then fair enough then, disregard my replies in relation to your post.

 

[Kieren]

that’s a shame. A well run Nominet could’ve used the profits to fund lower reg fees/good causes…. and everyone has the same chance of acquiring the domain name (deep pockets depending)

It was pushed during the Haworth era and was basically another money grab to fund failing commercial efforts.

I wrote an article about it: https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/22/nominet_uk_addresses/

 

[Kieren]

In the current system there is a real benefit in getting additional memberships and tags, despite being clearly against the rules.
In the proposed system additional memberships will be meaningless since you can get additional tags on your account. But I must stress that Nominet believes additional tags will not make a difference, it's all about timing.

Nominet needs to step up its compliance work and shut down any memberships that exist only to game the system. I believe it should give everyone an amnesty period to get their house in order, and then step in to make the system fairer.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/31/uk_address_bulgarians/

 

[Systreg]

I'm not asking for your deepest catching secrets, but can someone point in the right direction that might help with regards to number of EPP creates, how many early microseconds and delay microseconds etc. I can't see anything about those things on the forum, apart from some posts on this thread mentioning number of EPP creates.

After now using this new system for several months, I'm none the wiser as to how it works, not a clue, I see no connection between creates, early and delay at all, and miss every contested domain I load daily.

I was looking at my catcher and thinking about trying to set it to poll at something like the 5 x per second speed, as that's what I always polled at on the old DAC system.

I know polling at 5 x per second is a 200 millisecond delay between sending the 5 creates on the old system, then it dawned on me, and I hadn't noticed it before, but the timings in my catcher are shown in microseconds, not milliseconds like on the other system.

So, wanting to be a bit quicker than 200 milliseconds, a lot of the time I'd set the delay to 80 a lot of the time, thinking that was 80 milliseconds, when it's actually microseconds, so that 80 microseconds translates to 0.08 milliseconds, I have no idea if 0.08 is too little a delay or what, any clues?

Same goes for the Early Microseconds, a lot of the time I had that set to 80,000 but still get a LATE response on some good names, so I've bumped that up to 90,000 or 100,000 now, and thinking it might be worth raising that to something around 300,000 early or more, but what correlation that early setting has to delay timing, I have no idea.

Then there are the number of EPP Creates, it depends on how many names I have loaded, but if 10 domains are loaded, I set it to send around 80 EPP creates, other times with less names loaded I'm upping it to 200 - 300 or so, still with no joy catching anything of value.

I did see another thread where someone said it's not worth sending more than about 20 EPP Creates, but I can't see how sending more is a problem, I suppose if you send 200 creates with an 0.08 delay between each one, that's got to be better than sending only 20 creates.

Any thoughts and pointers, please?

 

[Ben Thomas]

Personally, it’s not worth sending more than 12 creates. It’s really not about that. You can send 1000, it won’t matter. I’m sure we have all tried that by now.

The delay fluctuates, as far as anyone knows. You can probably figure out when to send for future domains by analysing data from previous missed domains. Gathering intel on competitiveness of domain names by the amount of EPP creates that are sent for it.

Something something packet sniffing.

It’s a lottery. But some people have better odds, no idea why. But they know something the rest of us don’t.

 

[Systreg]

Personally, it’s not worth sending more than 12 creates.

Hi Ben, surely the odds are better if you send more creates, just seen on another thread where someone said that if you sent 1,000 creates, only about 6 would be received, and I get that, but I think sending more is better as there is more chance of having a create land in the right window, no?

The delay fluctuates, as far as anyone knows.

Seriously? What's the point in being able to set a delay if it's not set in stone, why does it fluctuate.

You can probably figure out when to send for future domains by analysing data from previous missed domains. Gathering intel on competitiveness of domain names by the amount of EPP creates that are sent for it.

Haha, no, that's techy stuff, I used to see the DAC log on the old system on Rob's catcher, it showed me very basic things like times of drops and numbers, which means nothing to me, plus there is no logs on Rob's catcher for this new system anyway.

 

[Ben Thomas]

As far as I am aware, it fluctuates because people are sending too many EPP create commands and Nominet is having lag. They won't admit that, but I think that's the general consensus among the catching community. There's also delay in the time it takes to drop the domain. Something about 30ms.

And you'd think that would be the case, but if you imagine that 500 people are sending 100's of EPP creates at a time, it could cause some issues. Sort of like a DoS in a way I guess. So Nominet mitigate this by accepting only X amount of EPP creates. And again, as far as I am aware, that's 6 out of X amount that every catcher sends.

Sort of like sperm I guess, you've gotta make it to the egg to have a chance to fertilise it.

I really wish I had a better analogy for you

 

[webber]

Nominet servers are full of jizz