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]

This is the first I have heard of it. If you show your account rep your account they can help make sure it is resolved.

 

[MasterOfMyDomains]

Having an issue @Joe Styler . How do sales leads arise? I have my domain make offer, always wondered why people don't make an offer.

ACTION NEEDED: Set a price for green*********.com

*******************************************

Dear MOMD,


You have received a sales lead on green*******.com through Afternic's network.


A lead indicates that someone is interested in the domain, but is not prepared to buy it yet.
In order to proceed with this buyer, please take the following steps now:

 

[Joe Styler]

They made an offer but either you don't have a price set or the buyer wants to know what the price will be before they make an offer. Typically it is the first option. You have say a $20 floor with no other pricing set. The buyer says, "Hey I want to buy this domain how much is it?" We don't know we need a price before we can negotiate for you.

 

[richtrading]

The issue "Alert: Your Afternic account payment information has
changed." raised on 12 Apr, finally today 24 Apr Afternic reply it was due to "server update and repair"

 

[Arca]

How about an "emergency" email alternative? [email protected] just doesn't cut it if you urgently need support. Some things can't wait 4-5 days or however long they decide to take before they open your email...

 

[tonyk2000]

Some things can't wait 4-5 days or however long they decide to take before they open your email

This would be great... I also have (somewhat smaller) number domains with the main competitor (Sedo), but Sedo bothered to upgrade my acct. to "pro" and assigned an account manager. Account manager at Sedo responds promptly on the same or next business day (considering German timezone / public holidays). Afternic earns a lot more $$$ from my portfolio, so it is unbeliverable that the only Afternic support that can be received in timely fashion is provided by @Joe Styler here...

 

[Joe Styler]

[email protected] is usually pretty quick. They recently hired additional staff and they also have moved to extended hours so the response time should continue to improve.

 

[richtrading]

[email protected] is usually pretty quick. They recently hired additional staff and they also have moved to extended hours so the response time should continue to improve.

Why not introduce 24hr response time?

Recent example doesn't seem to match your expectation Joe. do you have an real metrics? I must have around 200 instances with consistent 2wk plus response times. eg 12 Apr - 24 Apr 2018 security incident raised (see above)

 

[Arca]

I wrote them last week about an issue caused by Afternic, not me, and I've yet to get a reply. I've written them more than once, but there is no way to speed up their response time - hence the need for an emergency contact email for more urgent matters.

They seem to take 4-5 days at least these days, though sometimes they take a week or longer before they respond. Sometimes they don't respond at all. Why can't they respond in 24 hours? If there's always a 4-5 day backlog, just work through that backlog and then consistently respond within 24 hours. Doesn't make sense to always maintain a delay of several days when you could just work through it and start answering on time.

Also, instead of hiring more support, try fixing the Afternic platform and Afternic.com site instead. Less technical issues, bugs, glitches, errors = less need for users to constantly contact support for help with technical issues, bugs, glitches, errors that arise due to the severely outdated Afternic platform.

 

[Joe Styler]

Why not introduce 24hr response time?

Recent example doesn't seem to match your expectation Joe. do you have an real metrics? I must have around 200 instances with consistent 2wk plus response times. eg 12 Apr - 24 Apr 2018 security incident raised (see above)

I let you know that I gave you the security response here and that the support team was aware of it and did not answer you as a result. I do have a weekly meeting where we review the response times from the support team. Over 90% of tickets are answered within 24 hours and that should continue to improve with expanded hours and staff.

 

[Joe Styler]

I wrote them last week about an issue caused by Afternic, not me, and I've yet to get a reply. I've written them more than once, but there is no way to speed up their response time - hence the need for an emergency contact email for more urgent matters.

They seem to take 4-5 days at least these days, though sometimes they take a week or longer before they respond. Sometimes they don't respond at all. Why can't they respond in 24 hours? If there's always a 4-5 day backlog, just work through that backlog and then consistently respond within 24 hours. Doesn't make sense to always maintain a delay of several days when you could just work through it and start answering on time.

Also, instead of hiring more support, try fixing the Afternic platform and Afternic.com site instead. Less technical issues, bugs, glitches, errors = less need for users to constantly contact support for help with technical issues, bugs, glitches, errors that arise due to the severely outdated Afternic platform.

If you give me the email you sent in the subject line or incident number I can track it on our side and see what happened.

 

[richtrading]

I let you know that I gave you the security response here and that the support team was aware of it and did not answer you as a result. I do have a weekly meeting where we review the response times from the support team. Over 90% of tickets are answered within 24 hours and that should continue to improve with expanded hours and staff.

Please share the response times for all my tickets. You'll see all your [email protected] work on weekly response times. I actually don't ever recall receiving an email back within 24hrs from that mailbox - has it ever happened?

Joe - you replying on a public forum doesn't count as a response by your team, no one worked on the defect reported for weeks. You need to step up and be more professional. Why not ask the Godaddy CEO help you?

 

[Arca]

If you give me the email you sent in the subject line or incident number I can track it on our side and see what happened.

They finally got back to me, after 5 days.

This is not rare or unusual at all. Support normally takes 4-5 days to respond, sometimes more.

While Afternic presumably is the most successful marketplace in the industry, the platform's operational budget inexplicably seems to reflect a fly by night operation that's about to go under, hence the unwillingness to direct any meaningful amount of resources towards get things fixed. Even something as simple as showing more than 50 domains on a page, a tiny simple feature that has been requested for years, doesn't get done. Users have put a tremendous amount of time into reporting "Problems, Bugs and Fixes at Afternic" in this thread, yet many bugs and issues persist and nothing happens to the requests posted over and over again. Is Bob Mountain even aware of this thread? Does Paul Nicks read it? Shouldn't working together with users to improve things be of a higher concern to the relevant people at GD and Afternic? The condition of the website (and the response rate of support) in no way reflects Afternic's massive daily sales volume, and GoDaddy's position as the largest registrar in the world. Lots of money coming in, yet so little seems to get put back into the platform generating those funds.

Afternic is like a crumbling engine that's being patched up and held together with scotch tape and strings of floss, on the brink of imploding at any moment. Directing a fraction of Afternic's sales commission fee towards the Afternic platform would be more than enough to turn it into it the best functioning marketplace in the industry. It's time to replace the old engine with a shiny new V8. I suspect even the commission paid by the members who sound off about Afternic issues in this thread alone would be enough to get this done.

Instead what we got was an announcement that no further improvements will be made to the Afternic website in 2018.

I really think GoDaddy needs to rethink their position on Afternic. Leaving the platform in such a state of disrepair, and ignoring the numerous pleas for things to get fixed, ideally for the whole site to get overhauled, indicates a disregard for all the crucial users of the platform who provide the domains that generate Afternic's profit. I don't understand what GoDaddy has to gain from consciously not fixing Afternic (as per the announcement that was made earlier this year that the platform will not see any significant updates and fixes in 2018). Many domainers outright refuse to use Afternic due to the horrible platform (lots of lost commission fees for GD, lost sales for those domainers), support gets swamped with support requests and don’t manage to reply in a timely manner, and the people who do use the platform heavily are constantly frustrated with all the things not working, all the technical issues, and the delayed responses from support and TA. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. Completely overhauling Afternic and bringing all parts of the platform up to present, getting everything to work smoothly would be a win-win for both sellers and for GoDaddy. @Joe Styler Nobody here wants to have an antagonistic relationship with Afternic and GD, but with the way things are it's hard not to be frustrated. Sales performance is top notch, but everything else about the platform is not. There's nothing the people who post here want more than for Afternic to be a successful and functional marketplace, that's why there are hundreds of posts in this thread. People just want what's broken to be fixed. The constant negativity in this thread is just a result of users frustration with Afternic not getting the updates it needs.

Another company, Apple, was facing a somewhat similar situation, of professional users constantly criticizing them for neglecting professional users. After ignoring these users for years, and garnering loads of ill will and bad press from professional users, Apple finally decided to launch the iMac Pro. Tim Cook specifically said that it was due to the "constant negativity" from professional users towards Apple that led them to launch the iMac Pro.

In threads on NP and in the comments of blog posts there seems to be constant complaining and negative comments about how bad the Afternic site is. Giving Afternic users our own "iMac Pro moment" is how you end this.

 

[tonyk2000]

the horrible platform

I guess that Afternic makes most $$$ from "preferred customers" - they do not have to use this web platform, as they have superuser api access and dedicated support. Failure to improve things for normal users may mean that Afternic does not care too much about any particular smaller domainer, or of all us together who are posting in this thread

 

[richtrading]

I'd like to ask Mr Wagner to help, and lend his support to resolve issues in a timely manner.

Can you also all email?

Mr Scott Wagner CEO Godaddy
[email protected]

 

[Sameh]

At least 10 domains were deleted from my Afternic account today and of course, there is no way to know which domains were deleted unless I'll waste more time comparing my portfolio to the downloadable list from Afternic. This happens at least once a month. Afternic doesn't send emails when they delete domains. Unless you keep an eye on the count in your Dashboard you will never know they deleted your domains.

At the same time, I can't access my Domain Settings in GoDaddy for the last 48 hours. The settings page keeps loading forever.

At the same time, I'm still waiting for three payments for GoDaddy Premium Listings that should have been paid out on Monday.

According to my time tracker, 95% of my wasted time is spent on dealing with GoDaddy & Afternic issues.

Company with Billions in Market Cap and Millions of Domains under management still have the most buggy system I dealing with for the last 10 years (on both, Afternic & GoDaddy).

I'm really not sure how hard and how expensive is it to hire real backend developers.

Is it really harder and more expensive than losing customers, frustrating the rest, hiring more Customer Support to deal with the pile of issues that keep popping up, losing revenue in sales?

 

[richtrading]

Is it really harder and more expensive than losing customers, frustrating the rest, hiring more Customer Support to deal with the pile of issues that keep popping up, losing revenue in sales?

Invariably it has been demonstrated failing departments rarely turn it around in business. Roughly 90% never change. Usually a dynamic business will sweep in, and the old business will wind up and shrink. So the question is... why a competing domain selling business hasn't popped up yet? Sedo isn't yet very good in my view.

 

[anantj]

why a competing domain selling business hasn't popped up yet

Building entrenched relationships with registrars and domain owners is not easy and take a significant amount of effort and time. Incumbents with reputation and registrar relationships have a massive monopoly. I'd say at this time, Afternic, GD and GD auctions are near monopoly (maybe not legally but attitude wise). With GD auctions increasingly getting more and more registrar's expired domain stream, GD auctions is, unfortunately a platform increasingly hard to ignore. Similarly Afternic. Given the extensive registrar partnerships they have for their DLS service, the benefits of listing on afternic far outweigh the pain that we all face. And this is exactly what GD is both banking on and leveraging!

 

[carob]

I don't understand what GoDaddy has to gain from consciously not fixing Afternic (as per the announcement that was made earlier this year that the platform will not see any significant updates and fixes in 2018). Many domainers outright refuse to use Afternic due to the horrible platform (lots of lost commission fees for GD, lost sales for those domainers), support gets swamped with support requests and don’t manage to reply in a timely manner, and the people who do use the platform heavily are constantly frustrated with all the things not working, all the technical issues, and the delayed responses from support and TA. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Seems the gist of what GD/Afternic said was that there is real return for them in investing in the partner sites that list their domains, whereas investing in the Afternic site itself is not profitable as it is not the main sales platform.

But that is not distinguishing between the Afternic site's role as the outward-facing sales platform for buyers, and the other role as backoffice admin and entry point for the suppliers, who are domainers and Namepros members. The attitude to suppliers is basically "If you don't like it, go somewhere else."

 

[Arca]

At least 10 domains were deleted from my Afternic account today and of course, there is no way to know which domains were deleted unless I'll waste more time comparing my portfolio to the downloadable list from Afternic. This happens at least once a month. Afternic doesn't send emails when they delete domains. Unless you keep an eye on the count in your Dashboard you will never know they deleted your domains.

See this thread. Sounds like the same issue as I encountered.