Problems, Bugs and Fixes at Afternic - Report Problems Here

[carob]

I suggest a new thread titled Problems, Bugs and Fixes at Afternic - Report Problems Here. Then we can all list our issues so Afternic have to fix them. These Afternic probs have been repeatedly flagged up across numerous threads on here over a period of time, including the need for 2FA. Godaddy own Afternic and have the resources and motivation to fix it - this risky mess is unacceptable and reflects badly on their brand.

For info, Afternic keep reverting some of my domains to "In Review" status for no reason, and I only know that if I log in there to check on them. Until I then ask support to take them out of Review they are not listed for sale and will not sell at Afternic.

@Joe Styler When can we expect Godaddy to take action on Afternic, including implementing 2FA?

 

[Joe Styler]

I wish I had an account rep, but Afternic never assigned one to my account. 8-10 days the message was referring to is a normal payout delay period, it is always included into "domain sold" notifications. So I do not think that somebody is working on the issue at all. i will now re-send an email to service@, maybe they respond next week saying that they forwarded it to TA@ (exactly the same happened last year).

Send me a pm and give me your account information and I will take a look and see what I can do.

 

[alexdon82]

I wish an Option for builk edit/bulk remove names from Afternic.

All main Players have this future for years, could you please finally implement it?

Thanks!

 

[tonyk2000]

Send me a pm and give me your account information and I will take a look and see what I can do.

Thanks Joe, PM sent

 

[tonyk2000]

On two different occasions (once - last year, and another time - last week), for domains successfully sold on afternic (including FAST TRANSFERS!), I received emails from parties representing themselves as new registrars or their resellers, and asking me to click on different links to verify my email and/or proceed with the final domain push.

What I beleive has happened is that some afternic participating registrars do not bother to respect afternic (fast) transfer technology. Unfortunately. Instead, they grab my whois at the sale time, and add it into their system, and ask me to confirm ownership change!

As a seller, I do not think that I am able (or supposed to) confirm anything to such registrars.

If I receive a "Congrats, ... has sold" afternic email - it states "No action is needed from you at this time". Which is fine. How am I supposed to know who purchased the domain and through which registrar or reseller? How am I supposed to respond to subsequent e-mails like "Something INC has received your request to change the registrant to < John Doe @ email > please click here to confiirm" ?

Sorry, but I do not know who purchased the domain. I do not know where they purchased the domain. And, due to security reasons, I would not click links emailed from unknown senders anyway.

@Joe Styler - is there a way to eliminate such emails, and ask all participating registrars to correctly support afternic transfer technology?

If it is not done, and if we the sellers start clicking on each and every link received by email... this opens all sorts of loopholes. What if somebody really purchases a domain, but with an interntion to subsequently send email to afternic seller, an email with virus link? Afternic seller may mistakenly click on it...

 

[canswift]

Kudos to Afternic for now allowing us to use sales lander pages without ads! At least this is new to me.

Yes indeed! I got the email announcement this morning, so it's new to me too. I have already changed a couple of names over to use the NS3 & NS4 Afternic nameservers. They do resolve beautifully to that light clean Afternic for-sale page, no ads (which is what I wanted) and I'm very happy to let them earn their commission from this point on!

 

[Joe Styler]

On two different occasions (once - last year, and another time - last week), for domains successfully sold on afternic (including FAST TRANSFERS!), I received emails from parties representing themselves as new registrars or their resellers, and asking me to click on different links to verify my email and/or proceed with the final domain push.

What I beleive has happened is that some afternic participating registrars do not bother to respect afternic (fast) transfer technology. Unfortunately. Instead, they grab my whois at the sale time, and add it into their system, and ask me to confirm ownership change!

As a seller, I do not think that I am able (or supposed to) confirm anything to such registrars.

If I receive a "Congrats, ... has sold" afternic email - it states "No action is needed from you at this time". Which is fine. How am I supposed to know who purchased the domain and through which registrar or reseller? How am I supposed to respond to subsequent e-mails like "Something INC has received your request to change the registrant to < John Doe @ email > please click here to confiirm" ?

Sorry, but I do not know who purchased the domain. I do not know where they purchased the domain. And, due to security reasons, I would not click links emailed from unknown senders anyway.

@Joe Styler - is there a way to eliminate such emails, and ask all participating registrars to correctly support afternic transfer technology?

If it is not done, and if we the sellers start clicking on each and every link received by email... this opens all sorts of loopholes. What if somebody really purchases a domain, but with an interntion to subsequently send email to afternic seller, an email with virus link? Afternic seller may mistakenly click on it...

You should not click any emails or move any domains without contacting [email protected] if there is an issue. Most fast transfer domains go through on their own. The few that do not can mainly be fixed on the back end and automatically fulfilled. It is rare that a domain would not be able to move or be fixed. In that case you should contact [email protected] if you have a question about your transaction. It is also more than likely that the other registrar where the domain was purchased is following up with us on the domain sale to get the domain to their buyer. That usually takes a couple days. We can also see names that are stuck when we audit them but again that would not be instant and this would be an edge case.
It is always in your best interest to contact support if you have a question about a transaction.

 

[Arca]

@Joe Styler - When we set up our wire transfer payee profile we have the option of 1. getting the payment sent in USD with a $20 fee, or 2. receiving the payment in a local currency with a $15 fee (a 3% currency conversion fee may be applied on top of the $15 fee).

I'm not entirely clear about the distinction between these two payment options. What's the benefit, if any, of having Afternic convert USD to another currency prior to disbursing the funds, as opposed to just having Afternic send USD and let the receiving bank convert the funds to the local currency of the account holder?

 

[Joe Styler]

It depends on your receiving bank. What they will charge you on conversion and other fees. For specifics it is best to contact [email protected] with your specifics and then to contact your bank so you can find the best deal for yourself. They should be fairly close but what you are after is if the bank receiving it charges you to convert the currency from USD to your local currency and if they are going to charge you less or more than the 3% our vendor charges.

 

[tonyk2000]

So I don't think this is something we could do differently than we do now. Long story short, if someone buys an ssl for a domain you own we don't know if they should be buying it or not until we ask you via that email or another means.

Each and every day, at the same time, I receive one and and the same email from GoDaddy asking me to approve ssl cert for this afternic-listed domain for which I never purchased ssl. Already have 30+ such emails.

@Joe Styler - do you have an idea for how long will the system try to obtain my approval?

 

[Joe Styler]

Maybe you should block the emails with that information in the subject line or contact GoDaddy support. It can happen indefinitely. If someone keeps requesting the SSL on that domain we are going to keep sending emails. I think I explained this in length already in this thread but we do not know if you want an ssl or not. We don't know if you have a company with an employee asking to put the SSL on your domain or a webmaster who is applying an SSL legitimately to a site he is building for you etc etc. We have to ask the registrant as part of the SSL verification. Since we have no way of knowing if the SSL request is valid or not we need to ask the domain owner.
This gives you two options, you can call into support and ask them to reach out to the person who keeps asking us to validate the SSL and tell them to stop because I think that more than likely they are making a mistake and trying to put an SSL on a similar domain and wondering why they are not getting the emails they are supposed and keep asking us to resend them. Or you can ignore them and block the email coming in with that exact subject so you don't have to spend any time on it. Eventually the person asking for the wrong SSL will figure it out.

 

[tonyk2000]

you can call into support

This one is in Spanish, I would have no issues responding to email also in Spanish basically asking GD to stop, but I am lazy to make international call to Spanish number included. And I cannot email back as it is from noreply@ email and explicitly asks me to *iniciar sesión en la cuenta* (start an account session) to respond. Each daily email is generated at the same time, so it appears that the bot is trying to obtain my approval, not a customer logging in each day. OK, I'll wait some more time. Thanks Joe.

 

[richtrading]

Afternic errors April 11th and 12th, Anyone else seeing
"We apologize, but something seems to have gone wrong...
Our technical team will have a solution very shortly." across the whole Afternic site? My Settings, Dashboard etc. I called in, spoke to Jessica, but wasn't satisfied with the support.

 

[Michael M]

Afternic errors April 11th and 12th, Anyone else seeing
"We apologize, but something seems to have gone wrong...
Our technical team will have a solution very shortly." across the whole Afternic site? My Settings, Dashboard etc. I called in, spoke to Jessica, but wasn't satisfied with the support.

Yup, have the same error here today.

 

[richtrading]

When I called in, they were unaware of the fault... seems strange that no technical staff aware of the fault. It is has been broken for 2 days now. What is worse, I am logging in to check why my "payment details" have been changed. And no one replies from the [email protected] team yet.

 

[xynames]

I couldn't login at first to Afternic to respond to an offer on one of my domains, but a minute or so later was able to login fine.

 

[Joe Styler]

I checked in with the support manager. He said there was an issue but it should be resolved. Please let me know if you are still seeing it.

 

[richtrading]

I checked in with the support manager. He said there was an issue but it should be resolved. Please let me know if you are still seeing it.

Thank you Joe, yes it seems to be working at the moment.

[email protected] never replied about why I was sent a changed "payment details" email (the details don't appear to have been changed - but you can confirm that). At least I could log in and change the password to be safe. (note all our computers here are secure with very safe not repeated passwords, we have not been compromised)

 

[Joe Styler]

could be several reasons. One of the most common is if you are waiting to get paid for something and they add a "new" payment method on the back end and then remove it, it forces the payment to try in the back end again. They do that when troubleshooting a stuck payment sometimes or for other reasons. They should answer you but it depends on when you sent it in. They normally reply within 24-48 hours. They do not work on the weekends.

 

[richtrading]

could be several reasons. One of the most common is if you are waiting to get paid for something and they add a "new" payment method on the back end and then remove it, it forces the payment to try in the back end again. They do that when troubleshooting a stuck payment sometimes or for other reasons. They should answer you but it depends on when you sent it in. They normally reply within 24-48 hours. They do not work on the weekends.

Thank you for your reply Joe.

When Afternic email me to say payment details have changed, it makes us suspect hacking. I emailed Afternic on 12/04/18 15:00 GMT - still no response today. Is there an emergency contact team who deal with serious issues like this?
What can be done to improve this situation please?

When spoke with Jessica she didn't at first believe the site was faulty and was unaware of it.
Jessica promised she would email me outcome on 12 Apr. But never did. Jessica refused to tell me her manager's name when I called. Can anything be done to improve this situation please?

Thank you

 

[Joe Styler]

You couldn't speak with a manager yesterday he was doing training for some of the other people in the company to help make sure that when you get a 1rst tier support they understand the Aftermarket. Jessica has been here for many years your answer from her or the manager would be the same thing.
She didn't email you probably because she knows I already told you. Its a team that sits right by me and often times if they know I answered someone already they don't do double work.
There isn't a way to speed up checking your account because we have to check with another department as well. I think it is highly unlikely that you were hacked. We were not. So you would have to have been. The only weakness would be your email address if that were compromised and they used it to complete a password reset then maybe but normally if they are savvy enough to be in your email they are savvy enough to erase the - your password was reset - emails that are sent - and I imagine probably would not overlook erasing the - we changed your payment method emails. They're also not updating anything in your payment settings as you said, so why break into the account and update nothing in it? They also apparently didn't change your existing password because you logged in to be able to look over your payment method and update the password.

So the scenario as I see it is highly unlikely that someone else was in your account. So I ask you again are you expecting payment for something that may have been stuck waiting to pay you? If you recently sold something and are expecting payment that is likely what happened. Someone forced the payment to restart on the back end. If you did not recently sell something then we can look into it a little more closely and either way if you think your account was compromised I would update the email password used for it and try getting an email that has a 2 factor auth to use if you are concerned about security. You already said you updated your account password so that should be good.

 

[richtrading]

Thank you for your reply Joe. Re our security, we're very security conscious. We have not been hacked. We're market leaders on IT security.

Are you able to see who forced this payment method update? What IP address was it in your server logs?

Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2018 06:54:03 -0700 (PDT)

When I make a commitment to reply, I reply. It's just the way we are professionally in our business. Why not ask Jessica to reply?

We get payments regulary from Afternic. Never before had Afternic email say "Alert: Your Afternic account payment information has changed."

"If you didn’t authorize this change, please contact customer service at (866) 351-9586 (US) or +1 (781) 839-7990 (worldwide) or email [email protected]."

Still no one from Afternic Service has responded. No one knew what had happened when I called, and Jessica promised she would email me to advise.

#disapointed

 

[Joe Styler]

Then you probably never had a payment get stuck on the back end before. It happens rarely.

 

[richtrading]

Then you probably never had a payment get stuck on the back end before. It happens rarely.

Could you update the afternic email message so it is clear? Seems odd to send out "Alert: Your Afternic account payment information has changed." that cost us $500 of staff time to investigate and change passwords. We're still not certain, as your team won't give any response.

 

[tonyk2000]

Last time I reviewed my afternic payment details (bankwire if it matters), it also sent me "payment info changed" e-mail, even though I did not change anything. This should also be fixed.

 

[richtrading]

Can Afternic add 2FA? Godaddy already have 2FA. It's a security risk that Afternic don't have it.