GoDaddy Might Be Making Your Inbound Inquiry Via WHOIS Impossible

[jideofor]

Has anybody noticed that contact details of domains at Godaddy are being deleted or non existing? If you have your domains at Godaddy and receive inbound inquiries for domains that you have at Godaddy, this might be killing your chances of receiving offers/inquiries.

For some time now, they have been on this scheme. First you can't view them when you use WHOIS.COM and then they went to further to make it impossible to see contact details when you use ICANN whois search.

Who else has taken note? I might be wrong or my computer is giving off false information but I would like to know if I am the only one experiencing this.

 

[tonyk2000]

from companies pretending to be us and offering logo or web design services

I admit that after receiving first logo design offer email with a From field saying "Go Daddy" and a text starting with "Thank you for registering your new domain with Go Daddy", I was somewhat surpised. Did not expect to receive a logo design offer from GD. It however took a few seconds to open advanced email headers to find that the email was not originated from GD network / IPs. It may well be that non-domainers or those customers who are unfamiliar with technical analysis of email headers - they indeed paid spammers thinking that they are paying to GoDaddy

 

[sdom]

I do sell names I own and personally I am not opting in to show my info all over the place. I prefer to get less spam email and do not think it will impact my sales.

Many people also will not be comfortable to have their info shown all over the place. Its nice to hear you are working towards reducing spam for domains without privacy. There are many who want complete privacy but staying out it because of high charges. Is there any scope for Godaddy to reduce privacy protection charges?

 

[Asfas1000]

I doubt spammers are taking their data from Godaddy'w WHOIS. It would be an overkill.

Instead, a daily list of the new registrations is being sold and anyone can buy it.

 

[NamesMax]

One of the other negatives of this, @Joe Styler, is that I use Efty to manage my portfolio. The whois record is used to update my records at Efty. It now does not update my Go Daddy records.

I was in the process of abandoning Go Daddy and got down to about 50 or so names registered there. I spent time talking with my VIP Act Exec and I decided to give Go Daddy another look, specifically because of the end user familiarity with the brand. I transferred over 500 names to Go Daddy.

I then tried to update the information in Efty to realize that 99% would not update. Even the names that I recently registered at Go Daddy were not complete. Efty could not even pull from the Whois, anything but the dates.

Can you realize how time consuming and frustrating going back and manually inputting this information for 500 names was? Yes I saved $160 in fee costs as a result of Go Daddy transfer pricing, but I lost a heck of a lot more in my valuable time doing what the automated software could and should have been doing. Suffice it to say giving Go Daddy another "look" was not a pretty sight. Go Daddy's lose will be Epik's gain.

 

[Asfas1000]

One of the other negatives of this, @Joe Styler, is that I use Efty to manage my portfolio. The whois record is used to update my records at Efty. It now does not update my Go Daddy records.

Same experience here, Efty won't update properly.

 

[Kate]

I am just catching up from being away for a few days for Thanksgiving. We are testing things on port 43 not the web based lookup. We are definitely blocking info and this is not against ICANN rules. We have to support WHOIS on port 43 for other registrars to do things like transfer domains we do not have to make our WHOIS available to anyone who wants to mine it.

If I am not wrong registrars usually whitelist each other based on the basis of designated IP addresses.

I know that I may be in the minority, but I like the stricter whois policies of some ccTLD registries.
For example if you want to know the registrant of a .se domain you have to check on the Swedish registry website and fill out a captcha if you need to drill down the registrant details. That makes it impractical for spammers to mine the whois database. But if somebody needs to contact you for a good reason, they can.
When we register those ccTLDs we never get spam.

If the whois output says you need to check on Godaddy to get full registrant name I guess the other party should be able to figure that out. The problem though is when you use a third party website to check whois, for example Dynadot, and it returns nothing because it cannot connect to the Godaddy whois server. Then we have a problem. The problem is the lack of consistency.

 

[Jasonn]

If I am not wrong registrars usually whitelist each other based on the basis of designated IP addresses.

I know that I may be in the minority, but I like the stricter whois policies of some ccTLD registries.
For example if you want to know the registrant of a .se domain you have to check on the Swedish registry website and fill out a captcha if you need to drill down the registrant details. That makes it impractical for spammers to mine the whois database. But if somebody needs to contact you for a good reason, they can.
When we register those ccTLDs we never get spam.

If the whois output says you need to check on Godaddy to get full registrant name I guess the other party should be able to figure that out. The problem though is when you use a third party website to check whois, for example Dynadot, and it returns nothing because it cannot connect to the Godaddy whois server. Then we have a problem. The problem is the lack of consistency.

Yes, that is a problem and I wonder how many other registrars have the same problem, they just can't connect to godaddy so no link or info is shown at all.

also, unless someone has domains only at godaddy and nowhere else blocking whois for spammers won't make a difference as they'll just get it from one of the other registrars the person uses.

i don't mind a link where people are told to go there to look it up but the whole can't connect to godaddy issue is no good.

isn't the whois for .com and .net supposed to move to verisign soon anyways?

 

[Joe Styler]

Many people also will not be comfortable to have their info shown all over the place. Its nice to hear you are working towards reducing spam for domains without privacy. There are many who want complete privacy but staying out it because of high charges. Is there any scope for Godaddy to reduce privacy protection charges?

It is something we are looking at but nothing certain yet.

 

[Joe Styler]

Yes, that is a problem and I wonder how many other registrars have the same problem, they just can't connect to godaddy so no link or info is shown at all.

also, unless someone has domains only at godaddy and nowhere else blocking whois for spammers won't make a difference as they'll just get it from one of the other registrars the person uses.

i don't mind a link where people are told to go there to look it up but the whole can't connect to godaddy issue is no good.

isn't the whois for .com and .net supposed to move to verisign soon anyways?

WHOIS changes are coming overall. How so I do not think is 100% nailed down yet but there are things ICANN is actively discussing such as new European data privacy laws. I would keep my eyes on the blogs and industry news and see what happens as it unfolds. Here's an article a European Registrar wrote in September about that law, https://www.ovh.ie/news/articles/a2535.whois-at-risk-gdpr-discussion-with-afnic. I am not sure what will happen yet beyond changes seem inevitable. If you do not use a for sale landing page for your domains you should look into that with one of the services like Afternic

 

[Joe Styler]

Yes, that is a problem and I wonder how many other registrars have the same problem, they just can't connect to godaddy so no link or info is shown at all.

also, unless someone has domains only at godaddy and nowhere else blocking whois for spammers won't make a difference as they'll just get it from one of the other registrars the person uses.

i don't mind a link where people are told to go there to look it up but the whole can't connect to godaddy issue is no good.

isn't the whois for .com and .net supposed to move to verisign soon anyways?

They can contact us about it, it is normally something we can work out with them easily and they may not have things configured to work correctly. I just helped with getting another registrar set up correctly this week. We are pretty easy to work with for other registrars, but we can only help them fix what they tell us is not working.

 

[Jasonn]

WHOIS changes are coming overall. How so I do not think is 100% nailed down yet but there are things ICANN is actively discussing such as new European data privacy laws. I would keep my eyes on the blogs and industry news and see what happens as it unfolds. Here's an article a European Registrar wrote in September about that law, https://www.ovh.ie/news/articles/a2535.whois-at-risk-gdpr-discussion-with-afnic. I am not sure what will happen yet beyond changes seem inevitable. If you do not use a for sale landing page for your domains you should look into that with one of the services like Afternic

Yes, I am aware of these changes however I was referring to the switch to thick whois which I thought was supposed to happen fairly soon. These euro privacy laws I find fairly ridiculous. People should be able to pick a registrar that offers free or cheap privacy protection if they need it.

I know with .ca domains the whois is blocked by default but there is also the option to opt out of this block. Personally I have opted out of the block so all my info shows up. That kind of option should exist on any kind of forced privacy protection. Not to mention this is a european law...why should the rest of the world have to change to accommodate them? use a european registrar if you want that.

Then there is RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol which is a whole other can of worms...personally i think things are fine as is. i own lots of domains and get 10-15 spams a day but i don't see the big deal. delete and move on.

 

[wwwweb]

Had issues with a transfer as it was coming up as ******* for the email? They had to manually go, and input it at the register level.

 

[sofiapartner]

I left godaddy and don't care about them. Poor support, very expensive, not user-friendly site, always trying to sell you something additional... ughh... so happy that I am not there anymore.

 

[xynames]

Does this issue have to do with running the WhoIs of a domain registered at GDiddy or with running the WhoIs of any domain on the GD site?

In general I find that GD isn’t the best website to use for WhoIs checks but when I just now ran WhoIs on Domaintools for one of my GD registered domains I did get full WhoIs info although it is cached - from five months ago.

I tried it at Domaintools for another domain of mine at GD that I acquired a month ago, and the WhoIs is cached from October 23rd - just prior to when I acquired it so it reflects the prior owner’s info.

So it does seem that GD is releasing WhoIs info to other registrars but not real time. This may be the issue - that GD is not releasing real time WhoIs info on its domains to other registrars.

When I ran the WhoIs for the above two domains at the GoDaddy WhoIs website itself, the WhoIs info came back fine, correct and current.

 

[Optimal Names]

Has anybody noticed that contact details of domains at Godaddy are being deleted or non existing? If you have your domains at Godaddy and receive inbound inquiries for domains that you have at Godaddy, this might be killing your chances of receiving offers/inquiries.

For some time now, they have been on this scheme. First you can't view them when you use WHOIS.COM and then they went to further to make it impossible to see contact details when you use ICANN whois search.

Who else has taken note? I might be wrong or my computer is giving off false information but I would like to know if I am the only one experiencing this.

With the craziness of the holidays, and my life in general, I seem to have missed this. Yes, I have been commenting about this for many months. 1/2 of my domains suddenly have almost no WHOIS info. The .IO registry owners who took over earlier 2017 have done similar.

Inbound inquiries crashed. I hate the spam but in there were legit offers AND sales were made from there. Now, NO inbound offers on those WHOIS-limited domains I own. Thats for posting this, thought it was just my names and since there is no way for me to contact GoDaddy these days (telephone and chat are not an option for me), I just figured I'd leave it be.

 

[Joe Styler]

This post I did on GoDaddy's community help pages explains the changes and how to opt out if you do not want your whois info to be limited on port 43 automated lookups. https://www.godaddy.com/community/Domain-Investing/Whois-Masking-what-is-changing/td-p/88329

 

[Optimal Names]

This post I did on GoDaddy's community help pages explains the changes and how to opt out if you do not want your whois info to be limited on port 43 automated lookups. https://www.godaddy.com/Domain-Investing/Whois-Masking-what-is-changing/td-p/88329

getting a not-found type of page
"Whoops! Looks like you're lost. Maybe you were typing too fast. Or maybe we moved the page you were looking for (sorry about that). Whatever happened, there’s nothing to see here. Try one of the links below to get back on track."

 

[Joe Styler]

I answered you in the other thread on this. https://www.godaddy.com/community/Domain-Investing/Whois-Masking-what-is-changing/td-p/88329

 

[NamesMax]

Still a broken link @Joe Styler.

I had a large portfolio at GD and moved most of them away. I was down to 70 or so names with you. Act. Rep. Rob Hardwick convinced me to come back. In the fall I moved about 500 names back to GD. When my Efty software could not even pull the whois to update my names and I had to do it manually, my transfers back stopped.

This has been Epik.com's gain. A 42 cents more for transfers, but my time is worth a lot more than that.

 

[Joe Styler]

Still a broken link @Joe Styler.

I had a large portfolio at GD and moved most of them away. I was down to 70 or so names with you. Act. Rep. Rob Hardwick convinced me to come back. In the fall I moved about 500 names back to GD. When my Efty software could not even pull the whois to update my names and I had to do it manually, my transfers back stopped.

This has been Epik.com's gain. A 42 cents more for transfers, but my time is worth a lot more than that.

Rob should be able to help you with any bulk changes on our end that you need to make.