Yet another reason why Verisign sucks

I usually try to stay off of bandwagons. They always seem to have large amounts of scratchy, smelly hay, and you come away from the bandwagon trip just wishing that you could get a shower and not see any of your bandwagon mates for a while; a few hours with 'em and you realize that you really need something else to talk about.

But I'm jumping on this one—Verisign sucks. Sure, there's the whole thing about hoopla.com and Verisign totally fubaring things and not being willing to undo their mistakes…but I've got my own gripe to add.There's a domain I've wanted to register for some time. (Some of you can probably guess what it is, but I'm not going to repeat it here so that I don't inspire others to go questing for it as well.) I got disappointed when I did a search—turns out that .com, .net, and .org for this particular word were all taken.

At least…that's what I thought at first. Then I read more closely.

The .net version of the domain was bought in early 2000 by some Italian company. Their lease on the domain name expired on February 6, 2002. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, check your watches—today is June 4, almost four months to the day after the owner let the name expire—and yet this domain name is not available for purchase.

Frustrating? You bet. I've got an actual use for this domain name. I even emailed Verisign about it, and all they were willing to say was "Yeah, it's expired, we'll clear it out eventually, so sit your ass down and be patient."

Ok, so they didn't actually say to sit my ass down, but that was the general idea.

I can understand why domain-name sellers would not want to make domain names available the moment they expire, because of the domain-name pirates who like to snap up accidentally-expired domains and offer them up for "buyback" to the original owners. But four months? That's not giving the customer a few extra days to take care of the problem…that's outright laziness on the part of Verisign.

The company that originally purchased the domain name I want appears to have gone out of business some time ago. I don't know what Verisign is hoping to gain by hanging on to this domain name—perhaps they're hoping that this nonexistent company will resurrect itself and renew this domain?

Highly unlikely.

Almost, but not quite, as unlikely as my buying the domain name from Verisign. Incompetents.

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Comments

On , Tam said...
I tried to transfer my hosting from one host to another. I thought it would be simple to log into Verisign and make the switch. Um, right-o. No luck on my own at first. I call - the computers are down. I need to try back the next day. I call the next day and they ask my security question. Except - get this - it ISN'T MY SECURITY QUESTION. I give them the last four of my soc. anyway (knowing the entire time I didn't use something that obvious as my question) and the guy tells me it doesn't match what they have in their system. So now I have to prove my identity without the use of my social security number. I also can't validate my old address (I could swear I changed it in their records when I moved but they don't have it) because of course everything I have that says I'm me has the new address on it. I hate Verisign too. Thanks for letting me vent.

On , JayDee said...
I ended my day feeding "I hate VeriSign" to google - just to see what came up. I have only a handful of domains. I have happily managed them with a NIC Handle for the past six or seven years. But no more. VeriSign is upgrading. Each domain is getting *at least* one account. Hip this: accounts I didn't set up guarded by passwords I didn't create are now the only way I can manage my domains. Ah, yes: hubril essence. A call to customer (dis)service: "I'd simply like to administer all my domains using my NIC Handle." "Well, you can personalize one account using any name you want and then consolidate the other domains." "Okay, that might work..." But it didn't: not all the domains had been "migrated" so the system didn't know about them all. And their trite name/password rule set won't accept my NIUC Handle as a name. Another call to customer (dis)service gets, "Please, sir, be patient while we upgrade the rest of your domains." So I waited three months. VeriSign still wasn't done, but domain expiration time was approaching so I had to climb on their nonsense web interface. Pain in the ass! It's a cobbled-up piece of wade-through-the-ads-for-overpriced-services to get to the pages that you have to use in order to do what you pay them to do! To whom does one complain? What do we have to do to get them replaced?