Registerfly - CEO

[tldagent]

Below is an email that was forwarded to me with some of the latest information on the Registerfly Debacle. We have also added a news release on www.registerflies.com that explains a little more.

Has Enom known this all along?

"RegisterFly.com is one of the largest internet domain name registries.

They originally operated as a reseller of services from Enom.com, but in
February 2006 they received their own ICANN accreditation and became
authorized to manage and sell their own domain services. There has been
friction and difficulty between RegisterFly and Enom for well over a
year, and in the past several weeks it appears that Enom has "fired"
RegisterFly. They sent alarming emails to all the customers who had been
receiving resold services announcing that their relationship with
RegisterFly was severed and informing them how to access their
automatically transferred domain names in a new Enom.com account.

I have experienced a long and dreadful history of problems with
RegisterFly, and I am apparently not alone. In fact, some industrious
person has set up the domain "www.registerflies.com" where he has
documented numerous problems AND the failure of ICANN to act responsibly
to address a situation that is clearly not acceptable for an accredited
registry managing over two million domain names.

But the real story isn't just that people are unhappy. Last night I
called their secondary customer support number to see whether they might
be able to help with major problems that have been occurring all week
(since the main support number obviously could not.) I'm not talking
about minor stuff, but rather a situation where the customer service
reps and administrators at RegisterFly CANNOT ACCESS their own systems
at all!

The rep I spoke with told me a story about the real problem. It seems
that the partners who started the company are fighting with one another,
and one of them is trying to force out the other. The one who is being
forced out has apparently been retaliating by hacking into the registry
systems and databases and making changes that have utterly paralyzed the
company. Suddenly my recent problems start to make sense. The outsourced
customer service reps have been telling us since Monday that they would
like to help, but that they cannot access the backend panels that
control their systems. They suggest it will be working in a few hours
and ask the customer to call back then. When you call back they loop
through the same scripted routine again.

This has been going on since Monday! The company cannot control its
systems. Even worse, the support rep indicated that they fear the
alienated partner is trying to hack and destroy the domain registration
databases. It is an incredible situation. Infighting at a domain
registry jeopardizing over two million domain names and preventing
customers from even being able to make minor changes to the domains they
own."

 

[name idol]

There is some breaking news available on www.registerflies.com

Quoting a tiny portion of the whole thing - hope that's OK and not too much out of context. Still would urge everyone affected to go and read the news for themselves:

"...

# Both John and Glenn have expressed their concerns about the customers and the domain names. They could not make anything public any earlier than this because they were building a Federal case against Kevin regarding Registerfly.

# They currently are on their way to the server location with a team of developers to start going through the data and have gained control of the servers that Kevin had them blocked out of.

..."

Welldone Schnitzeldorf, really hope your gut feeling about these guys is right.

If so, may The Force be with them!

 

[night707]

i personallylove registerfly ...


a registrar that prevents regular domain administration for thousands of owners deserves prosecution despite some lucky customers.

.

 

[shockie]

anyone know whether or not registerflies has contacted evil Kevin for his side of the story?

 

[JMJ]

Lack of being able to do something and not taking the time to figure out how to do something without having someone take you by the hand and walk you through it is entirely different. I tried to find the post I read on the forum but one of the people on Rflies talked about how he/she lost their name because like many others there they forgot to renew. The humorous thing about this particular post was the person took the time to find this site, sign up, type out their complaint about losing their name and how it destroyed thier business or whatever and then..

The very next post was someone replying to the thread telling them the important name they lost was sitting available. Kudos to schnitzeldorf for registering it and getting it to this person before some snake in the grass domainer snagged it..lol The point here is if this name was so important, important enough to go through all of that don't you think they would have looked to see if the name was available. Or do you think they just wanted to be part of some drama.

 

[Electric-Shadow]

i personallylove registerfly ...


a registrar that prevents regular domain administration for thousands of owners deserves prosecution despite some lucky customers.

.

What are you saying? that i can't like them just because you want to bash them?

I'm starting to think that this is all nothing more than rumours, I continue to love RF and am not going to budge.

 

[WGS_Thunder]

What are you saying? that i can't like them just because you want to bash them?

I'm starting to think that this is all nothing more than rumours, I continue to love RF and am not going to budge.

Try to unlock some of your domains there. If that doesnt work open a ticket and see if they respond to you. I have 3 open tickets, the oldest is 2/10 What's to like?

 

[JMJ]

Ok folks I'm going to end the rumors by example.

Here are two names I have registerfly. A few people if you will visit the whois link and confirm that 1. They are locked. 2. They are parked at parked.com using ns1.parked.com name servers.

http://whois.domaintools.com/siteplanner.info

http://whois.domaintools.com/specialreserve.info

This is what tells you that the names are locked.
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED

what it will say after being unlocked is
Status: OK

After a few confirmations I will then unlock the names and change the name servers. As far as support I can't help you there but even with the hundreds of names at 10 different registrars I have I very rarely need support.

If I can do these things then no one can say that they can't be done. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that certain people can do it and others can't other than those people not taking the time to figure out how to do it.

As far as renewal. 615.biz was at registerfly and in the old enom system up until they moved it out within the last week or so. Just last month I renewed the name through registerfly 2 days after it expired during the time everything was suppose to not be able to be renewed.

 

[tldagent]

Ok folks I'm going to end the rumors by example.

Here are two names I have registerfly. A few people if you will visit the whois link and confirm that 1. They are locked. 2. They are parked at parked.com using ns1.parked.com name servers.

http://whois.domaintools.com/siteplanner.info

http://whois.domaintools.com/specialreserve.info

This is what tells you that the names are locked.
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED

what it will say after being unlocked is
Status: OK

After a few confirmations I will then unlock the names and change the name servers. As far as support I can't help you there but even with the hundreds of names at 10 different registrars I have I very rarely need support.

If I can do these things then no one can say that they can't be done. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that certain people can do it and others can't other than those people not taking the time to figure out how to do it.

As far as renewal. 615.biz was at registerfly and in the old enom system up until they moved it out within the last week or so. Just last month I renewed the name through registerfly 2 days after it expired during the time everything was suppose to not be able to be renewed.

They gained control of the servers less than two hours ago. Actually physically gained control and they are working through the night. Kevin has been blocked out of the system and has in fact emailed me slander.

The registerfly website is currently taken down as they work on securing the data

 

[JMJ]

Well scratch that idea then. Anyway I've been able to do all of those things all along.

 

[tldagent]

news... slashdot accepted the story. I've moved Registerflies to it's own dedicated server... here we go

 

[verbster]

This is all playing out like a movie...like a bunch of knights breeched the castle walls and have rescued the holy grail server...while the evil one has been banished to the infamous "outside"... now if we only had streaming video of it all.

No pun...I'd love to be a fly on the wall for this.

 

[shockie]

Kevin has been blocked out of the system and has in fact emailed me slander.

how do you know it's slander

 

[tldagent]

Because I have been working on this for 1.5 years and the last 4 days straight non stop. I've not spent much time with my family and through a number of calls from registerfly employees in both locations, attorneys and much else... I dont' have time to deal with specifics. Just be happy that things are beginning to turn. News is coming in real time and I'm updating the site constantly!

 

[ccm]

heh, their site is down right now for me, as usual, I cannot get anything done.
Have a Nice Day.

 

[tldagent]

I feel comfortable these guys are now going to do everything in their power to protect what customers are and have been effected by all this. Some of the information is very personal that has come in and I will not disclose certain information.... but that doesn't mean you won't read it in a book someday.

....... here we go......

heh, their site is down right now for me, as usual, I cannot get anything done.
Have a Nice Day.

The are down due to changing the root passwords and setting up mirrors for the traffic.

There's a form made available on Registerflies.com that will get to the right source for proper ticket handling. This is forwarded to an email that Registerfly has set up specifically for the domainers registered on Registerflies.com

 

[labrocca]

WOW...sounds like the sheeet hit the fan there. It's about time. I wonder what is going to happen to the 11 domain transfers I initiated yesterday? Let's see if in 7 days they are successfully transferred to Moniker. I am SO damn happy that I unlocked and grabbed all my auth codes.

As JMJ said...RF is a total hassle pain in the butt registrar that sucks complete butt. However....if you put the effort in (which you really shouldn't have to) you won't lose any names...just time and energy.

I believe some domainers are noobs and just can't handle a problem properly when one arises....they panic and send a pissed off ticket to RF which inevitably just gets ignored due to the unprofessional nature of some people. Ironically it's RF that in the end is a very unprofessional registrar. Go figure.

This week is gonna be interesting. Let's see how much damage Kevin did and if RF can ever recover from this fiasco. They may need to change their name entirely and try to start over. At this point RF has such a terrible reputation. It's like when Bell Atlantic was a terrible company then they changed their image by becoming Verizon...suddenly they were so much better...lol.

 

[onewordonly]

At least try to transfer away the most valuable names. Otherwise your domains might well simply die at regfly.

I have been on registerfly yesterday and I found that all of my most valuable names have had the Transfer Code Deleted. That just goes to show something very devious is going on over there in my opinion.

I have tried to transfer some of the other 400 odd names I have with them and some are been processed now while others are throwing errors, I will hope to get them moved but it could take days yet before I know. All mine are not on the Enom system unfortunately.

As for the guy who owns Registerflies, well I think he has been one of the most helpful in this disaster with his phone calls and the pressure he has put on them so stop slamming him, if you can do better then step forward. Sure he may come across as a bit crazy in some ways but who cares. The only problem with Registerflies is the way the site is a bit buggy and unorganized, images dead etc. It would be great if it was cleaned up as it's a bit ironic that this is one of the things that piss's me off about Registerfly.com (been so buggy).

you can follow this tutorial to transfer your domains from Registerfly ( it still depends on if they will let you) I managed to transfer names away in last week but I'm still waiting to find out if I still can...

now to read the rest of this thread...

update: I now see that registerflies.com is down .. what next? :hehe:

 

[airwav]

Amazingly enough RF just anwsered their support line. They state that they will have their servers up and running by the end of the day...
I guess we will wait and see...

 

[verbster]

RF is back online. Unfortunately, all of my domains are designated clienttransferprohibited. I tried anyway...didn't work. Hope this is temporary.

Edit: The good news is that I did some bulk changes that worked...in about five minutes.

I know this sounds crazy, and I have no idea why I think it, but I think Registerfly is going to get their act together....that should cause some folks to pop a vessel or two!

 

[DNabc]

Really incredible what can happen to a company. I really liked them back in 2002.
My good domains are all away now. I left some .net's there and $40 in my account.

Now, as you've said, better to change the name of the company...