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?

 

[griff]

@Joe Styler

These four domains seem to have been the only domains on the "trending" table on the homepage (and the trending page at https://www.afternic.com/trending-web-domains) for quite a few years now, any plans to make it dynamic?

 

[Joe Styler]

No not anytime that I know of.

 

[richtrading]

Joe, Could Afternic provide traffic statistics for ns3 & ns4.afternic.com landers?
I'd hate to go back to smartname ns1 & ns2.afternic.com landers. Sedo or ParkingCrew are our backup idea.

 

[Joe Styler]

You mean traffic data? No we don't do that now. We do do it on parking which is all the other options you describe. We have it on our list of things to do in the future at some point.

 

[richtrading]

You mean traffic data? No we don't do that now. We do do it on parking which is all the other options you describe. We have it on our list of things to do in the future at some point.

Hi Joe, Thank you for your reply. Yes, traffic data. Could Afternic give us a timescale please? If it is within a few weeks, that would save us switching to other landing nameservers at Bodis etc. Cheers

 

[Joe Styler]

You can get it now the same way you are describing on bodis, parking. You can use smartname, Afternic's parking platform to park your domains and put a for sale banner on the top. Parking has stats on impressions and clicks.
What you are asking for sounds like the for sale lander page which has not ads and the whole page shows it is for sale, not just the banner at the top. That will not happen any time in the near future. We are looking at something in the next year or on the GoDaddy side which would solve for this.

 

[richtrading]

You can get it now the same way you are describing on bodis, parking. You can use smartname, Afternic's parking platform to park your domains and put a for sale banner on the top. Parking has stats on impressions and clicks.
What you are asking for sounds like the for sale lander page which has not ads and the whole page shows it is for sale, not just the banner at the top. That will not happen any time in the near future. We are looking at something in the next year or on the GoDaddy side which would solve for this.

Many thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately smartname, Afternic's parking platform is notoriously awkward and requires much correspondence with Afternic so our account manager can flush out and fix smartname issues (eg in someone else's account). We just don't have the staff time available for all that correspondence and manual fixes

Yes, we would like the ns3/ns4 sales lander to have impressions, stats. Hope it could be added in the future.
Thank you

 

[Ja Kai]

You can get it now the same way you are describing on bodis, parking. You can use smartname, Afternic's parking platform to park your domains and put a for sale banner on the top. Parking has stats on impressions and clicks.
What you are asking for sounds like the for sale lander page which has not ads and the whole page shows it is for sale, not just the banner at the top. That will not happen any time in the near future. We are looking at something in the next year or on the GoDaddy side which would solve for this.

Joe - Dan.com has this. You all, with your HUGE company, can't get something like this done

 

[richtrading]

Joe - Dan.com has this. You all, with your HUGE company, can't get something like this done

Yes, it feels more like a lack of ambition at GoDaddy. The tech side is very simple, few lines of code on the redirect and a few more to pull up a report with SQL. One engineer around 5-10 days tops. Do you have someone with SQL experience?

 

[MasterOfMyDomains]

So you know our traffic but we don’t for ns3 and ns4?
That levels the playing field for sure. Thanks

 

[Joe Styler]

Yes, it feels more like a lack of ambition at GoDaddy. The tech side is very simple, few lines of code on the redirect and a few more to pull up a report with SQL. One engineer around 5-10 days tops. Do you have someone with SQL experience?

It has nothing to do with that. That is not the answer on many of the things people ask or of course it would be done. It is not a wordpress site or something where you can just go in and make a 5 minute update.

The main reason we do not offer this now is that we use a third party software on the back end for that part of Afternic. It is not our software we can just change. That is how Afternic was when we bought it. In the current state we would have to purchase a license for each customer to see their info. We have purchased additional licenses for our top sellers.

We have a balance of spending time redoing our older code, integrating the companies we buy into our code base, and releasing new features, or onboarding new sales partners, etc. We do all of this and have over the past several years done some amazing things on the back end to be able to integrate services better and faster and also allow for scale, worldwide. Like opening and supporting a European sales team that has landers in local language and support and sales teams in those languages in Europe. China is underway as well. Navigating through International compliance and infrastructure takes real time and hard work to get things to work on the front end seamlessly when someone comes to buy your domain on a registrar in China in Chinese that we added and had to do dev work to get onboard in the last year, or a sales lander in German in Germany getting to a broker on our team who is in Europe and Speaks German and gets them on the phone right then on their time zone. on our backend (most of the time).

We have also been redoing the back end code for things like Smartname. Behind the scenes now that code is all pretty much redone and retired. There is now an easy way to get the domains that have duplicate records on parking to be removed from the person who doesn't own it and added automatically to the correct account on GoDaddy's cash parking using that code base. A solution for the smartname side will come in the near future. That work on the backend involved many other things as well for parking and now we are able to scale easier. We serve pages and ads faster and better, have a better performing template and are performing much better revenue wise for people who use us than at any time in the recent past with more improvements on the way in the near future.

We have been heavily focused on improving sales reach, but we have also focused on a lot of things in the back end which will allow for other changes in the future to be faster and easier. The sales focus has helped our sellers overall see a dramatic increase in their average sales price, and average sell through rate over the past couple years.

We have been having some meetings lately focusing more and more on the customer experience and that will continue to improve over the next year. Things like stats being available were discussed. Most if not all of the suggestions from customers on here were included.

I appreciate all the feedback. That's why I am here, so please keep it coming. My point is that often there are other things going on. We are not ignoring you, quite the opposite.

 

[Ja Kai]

Joe - Dan.com has this. You all, with your HUGE company, can't get something like this done

It has nothing to do with that. That is not the answer on many of the things people ask or of course it would be done. It is not a wordpress site or something where you can just go in and make a 5 minute update.

The main reason we do not offer this now is that we use a third party software on the back end for that part of Afternic. It is not our software we can just change. That is how Afternic was when we bought it. In the current state we would have to purchase a license for each customer to see their info. We have purchased additional licenses for our top sellers.

We have a balance of spending time redoing our older code, integrating the companies we buy into our code base, and releasing new features, or onboarding new sales partners, etc. We do all of this and have over the past several years done some amazing things on the back end to be able to integrate services better and faster and also allow for scale, worldwide. Like opening and supporting a European sales team that has landers in local language and support and sales teams in those languages in Europe. China is underway as well. Navigating through International compliance and infrastructure takes real time and hard work to get things to work on the front end seamlessly when someone comes to buy your domain on a registrar in China in Chinese that we added and had to do dev work to get onboard in the last year, or a sales lander in German in Germany getting to a broker on our team who is in Europe and Speaks German and gets them on the phone right then on their time zone. on our backend (most of the time).

We have also been redoing the back end code for things like Smartname. Behind the scenes now that code is all pretty much redone and retired. There is now an easy way to get the domains that have duplicate records on parking to be removed from the person who doesn't own it and added automatically to the correct account on GoDaddy's cash parking using that code base. A solution for the smartname side will come in the near future. That work on the backend involved many other things as well for parking and now we are able to scale easier. We serve pages and ads faster and better, have a better performing template and are performing much better revenue wise for people who use us than at any time in the recent past with more improvements on the way in the near future.

We have been heavily focused on improving sales reach, but we have also focused on a lot of things in the back end which will allow for other changes in the future to be faster and easier. The sales focus has helped our sellers overall see a dramatic increase in their average sales price, and average sell through rate over the past couple years.

We have been having some meetings lately focusing more and more on the customer experience and that will continue to improve over the next year. Things like stats being available were discussed. Most if not all of the suggestions from customers on here were included.

I appreciate all the feedback. That's why I am here, so please keep it coming. My point is that often there are other things going on. We are not ignoring you, quite the opposite.

I don't know why Godaddy.com doesn't want to be a superstar, in Registrar offerings and functionality of their site. Here are my observations - appropriate for this Godaddy "Bugs" thread.

1) Godaddy doesn't get it.
2) Godaddy's back-end is a disaster. Joe - everything is antiquated - programming wise. The domain manager still gets hung-up based on how you sort, transfers are still delayed at times, push's are still a disaster - I still receive emails that I'm the recipient of a domain I'm pushing elsewhere. People receiving pushes still need to enter in all their information, even when the sender checks the "no" box - and yes Joe, even when the sender includes both the recipients email and customer number. So many more indiosyncrasies - too many to mention.
3) Godaddy should take all suggestions and implement. If I would like a counter - as many people would - why not make it happen?
4) Godaddy (Joe et. al.) never admit that their platform is a disaster that needs a GIGANTIC overhaul.
5) Godaddy's new CEO should fly the TOP TEN Afternic/Godaddy seller's to corporate office for a day of discussion - on how to fix Godaddy's giant mess.
6) If Godaddy fixed their mess of a platform, I might bring domains back there. As stated previously, I use for expired auction purchases only.
7) If Godaddy offered free "Domains by proxy" or reduced their rate to something reasonable, they would have many more URL's registered there.
8) if godaddy would tell people in a email the reason for why an auction was cancelled, prior to sending refund, that would be great. Currently, the domain is simply switched from "won" to not won, and we are credited.
9)If godaddy would send an email explaining WHY they are swiping a domain from someones account, rather than that person seeing that they are missing a domain.
10) OMG - I could on and on

 

[richtrading]

5) Godaddy's new CEO should fly the TOP TEN Afternic/Godaddy seller's to corporate office for a day of discussion - on how to fix Godaddy's giant mess.

Hey Joe, Ja Kai, I'm ready!

Already explained many of these bugs to our account manager, eg the bulk accept pushed fails (impossible to accept in bulk), impossible to accept with any default contact info, must manually enter for every single pushed domain. Then all the strange emails, unclear if it really completed, need to manually check each.

 

[carob]

There is no option to disable fast transfer on a domain, the only way is delete it from Afternic and re-list it. Dangerous stuff.

WARNING: That method of disabling fast transfer by re-listing does not really work.

It may seem to work initially, then later stealthily Fast Transfer is progressively re-enabled on domains without you receiving an email with a link to click to enable it. It seems only Afternic "support" can disable Fast Transfer, but they may not even reply to emails.

Some registrars may let you disable Fast Transfer at registrar level, probably a global setting, but that is not possible at Namesilo.

As I said earlier, I now have no confidence in Afternic Fast Transfer and I do not want to use it.

 

[richtrading]

It has nothing to do with that. That is not the answer on many of the things people ask or of course it would be done. It is not a wordpress site or something where you can just go in and make a 5 minute update.

The main reason we do not offer this now is that we use a third party software on the back end for that part of Afternic. It is not our software we can just change. That is how Afternic was when we bought it. In the current state we would have to purchase a license for each customer to see their info. We have purchased additional licenses for our top sellers.

We have a balance of spending time redoing our older code, integrating the companies we buy into our code base, and releasing new features, or onboarding new sales partners, etc. We do all of this and have over the past several years done some amazing things on the back end to be able to integrate services better and faster and also allow for scale, worldwide. Like opening and supporting a European sales team that has landers in local language and support and sales teams in those languages in Europe. China is underway as well. Navigating through International compliance and infrastructure takes real time and hard work to get things to work on the front end seamlessly when someone comes to buy your domain on a registrar in China in Chinese that we added and had to do dev work to get onboard in the last year, or a sales lander in German in Germany getting to a broker on our team who is in Europe and Speaks German and gets them on the phone right then on their time zone. on our backend (most of the time).

We have also been redoing the back end code for things like Smartname. Behind the scenes now that code is all pretty much redone and retired. There is now an easy way to get the domains that have duplicate records on parking to be removed from the person who doesn't own it and added automatically to the correct account on GoDaddy's cash parking using that code base. A solution for the smartname side will come in the near future. That work on the backend involved many other things as well for parking and now we are able to scale easier. We serve pages and ads faster and better, have a better performing template and are performing much better revenue wise for people who use us than at any time in the recent past with more improvements on the way in the near future.

We have been heavily focused on improving sales reach, but we have also focused on a lot of things in the back end which will allow for other changes in the future to be faster and easier. The sales focus has helped our sellers overall see a dramatic increase in their average sales price, and average sell through rate over the past couple years.

We have been having some meetings lately focusing more and more on the customer experience and that will continue to improve over the next year. Things like stats being available were discussed. Most if not all of the suggestions from customers on here were included.

I appreciate all the feedback. That's why I am here, so please keep it coming. My point is that often there are other things going on. We are not ignoring you, quite the opposite.

Firstly, Many thanks for your reply Joe, and engaging with the domaining community.
Could I clarify, the new ns3/ns4 landers launched in 2018 aren't part of legacy Afternic are they? They run on AWS, launched recently.

Since 2016 there hasn't been any good reason to use proprietary or 3rd party. It's all Linux, LAMP etc since then.

The redirect anyway is just a redirect, done at the HTTP level, it's one line of code that checks the resolving name, and does an HTTP 302 redirect

ns3/ns4 runs on your AWS server 54.208.77.124 are you in control of this machine to make the changes?



$ wget acecakes.com
--2019-09-11 09:56:57-- http://acecakes.com/
Resolving acecakes.com (acecakes.com)... 54.208.77.124, 35.169.58.188
Connecting to acecakes.com (acecakes.com)|54.208.77.124|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://www.afternic.com/forsale/ac...C&traffic_type=TDFS_DASLNC&traffic_id=daslnc& [following]
--2019-09-11 09:56:57-- https://www.afternic.com/forsale/ac...C&traffic_type=TDFS_DASLNC&traffic_id=daslnc&
Resolving www.afternic.com (www.afternic.com)... 23.55.23.86, 2a02:26f0:a1:583::364d, 2a02:26f0:a1:5a2::364d
Connecting to www.afternic.com (www.afternic.com)|23.55.23.86|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 12680 (12K) [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’


Can this HTTP 302 redirect be logged in mysql?

While Chinese or German speakers may benefit some buyers, all our Chinese or German buyers write to us in English for our portfolio.

This ns3/ns4 has to be the no.1 issue at GoDaddy. We've just lost a whole year with the buggy new Domain Manager, still buggy, our GoDaddy account manger does his best, manually fixing many things, but it's probably wasted 200 hours of our staff time. The old Domain Manager was great, much better. Feels like a lot of time might be being spent on things that aren't a good focus.

Thanks again for engaging with the community.

Let me know if you want me to fly in for a top level meeting!

 

[richtrading]

WARNING: That method of disabling fast transfer by re-listing does not really work.

It may seem to work initially, then later stealthily Fast Transfer is progressively re-enabled on domains without you receiving an email with a link to click to enable it. It seems only Afternic "support" can disable Fast Transfer, but they may not even reply to emails.

Some registrars may let you disable Fast Transfer at registrar level, probably a global setting, but that is not possible at Namesilo.

As I said earlier, I now have no confidence in Afternic Fast Transfer and I do not want to use it.

Why not ask Namesilo? I always see the Namesilo opt-in. Alternatively just use a registrar that doesn't support Fast-Transfer if it is such a concern

 

[tonyk2000]

WARNING: That method of disabling fast transfer by re-listing does not really work.

It may seem to work initially, then later stealthily Fast Transfer is progressively re-enabled on domains without you receiving an email with a link to click to enable it. It seems only Afternic "support" can disable Fast Transfer, but they may not even reply to emails.

Indeed, Since it domain+account specific setting (fast transfer = enabled would be forever, at least without registrar change), it should be possible to 1) open 2nd afternic account 2) add domain in question to the 2nd account. Not a convinient way, but may be faster (vs. composing emails with uncertain outcome).

 

[tonyk2000]

Godaddy's new CEO should fly the TOP TEN Afternic/Godaddy seller's to corporate office for a day of discussion - on how to fix Godaddy's giant mess

Who knows, he maybe already doing this. In any case, with such a large company, an outcome of the CEO change would depend on his team. New CEO should almost instantly mean a new team of high-level staff. Actually one should not want (or expect) the CEO to participate in blogs or forums (so he unlikely reading this thread) or to personally deal with each and every customer... not his job. Who will form his team and how will they operate the company - this is the question...

 

[Kassey Lee]

We've just lost a whole year with the buggy new Domain Manager, still buggy,

The new Doman Manager would be perfect and make selling very easy IF it worked. BUT, after several weeks of trying, I have given up listing domains from Domain Manager. Upon suggestion from a support guy, I have resorted to the more stable way of listing domains in Afternic, then go back to Godaddy and set the DNS to ns3.afternic.com and ns4.afternic.com to use the Godaddy/Afternic lander.

 

[carob]

Why not ask Namesilo? I always see the Namesilo opt-in. Alternatively just use a registrar that doesn't support Fast-Transfer if it is such a concern

For fast transfer to work you have to enable at registrar level a permission called

Why not ask Namesilo? I always see the Namesilo opt-in.

Yes you see an opt-in email when you list a domain, but it seems not when you re-list it. And yet Fast Transfer gets enabled on the re-listed domain.

Valid point about asking NS, but if you ask Namesilo they tell you you can only disable it at Afternic.
Here is why:
https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Change-of-Registrant

Can I opt not to have NameSilo serve as my Designated Agent in relation to these policies?
No, you cannot. All users in our system must agree to our Terms of Service which contains the Designated Agent provision.

At some registrars, for example Internet.bs, you have to actively and probably globally enable the Designated Agent status for your account, which is always necessary before any Fast Transfer is possible. So if you then globally disable it at that registrar, Fast Transfer would be disabled for all domains there.

But at Namesilo you cannot disable Designated Agent status and you cannot disable FastTransfer on a per domain basis. How this works at each registrar is a matter for investigation, as to whether you can, after activating Fast Transfer for a domain or domains, turn that off globally or on a per domain basis at that registrar.