Much of my weekend was spent sending expletive-filled e-mails to “customer service” folks at Verisign. I literally cannot believe how one organization could be that incompetent — at times they were approaching WorldCom-esque proportions in the creative way they were keeping track of my domain name.
Okay, this story goes back a few weeks to when Macrobyte had its outage. I realized at that time that I didn’t have control over my main domain name, Carnell.Com. Why? Because it was registered to [email protected], and since that address wasn’t working, I couldn’t approve any changes via e-mail.
I also couldn’t make any changes at Verisign’s site, because in all its wisdom the company had assigned me not one, not two, but three separate account numbers and passwords without ever telling me. There’s supposed to be a challenge question there, but none existed for my account (the person I talked to about this was nice enough to admit my records were likely screwed up during past database migrations).
Anyway, so Macrobyte gets up and the first thing I want to do is move the domain from Verisign, which I do not trust, to Dotster. So I fill out a transfer request form, approve it — and get back this message that says I cannot transfer Carnell.Com because it expired in February 2002. I found that odd since a WHOIS query of Network Solutions database says that it doesn’t expire until February 2003.
So once again I’m on the phone with customer service. They tell me what the e-mail message from Verisign said — the domain name expired on February 2002. The woman adds in a cheery voice that it’s my lucky day because the domain name is still available if I want it.
Still available? WTF? Their own WHOIS database says I own it until February 2003. Doesn’t that mean anything? Actually, no. The customer service representative tells me that they don’t rely on the WHOIS database at all because there are so many errors in it.
Oh yeah, that really inspired more confidence in Verisign’s business practices.
So the bottom line is that when I renewed the domain name in 2001, somehow in the WHOIS database the expiration date was erroneously set to 2003. So when February 2002 came around they never invoiced me, I didn’t pay, and the real database they use (as opposed to the nonsense they put in their WHOIS system) knows this. So my only option is to renew with these folks and then transfer my domain name.
I did that this morning, but I’m skeptical if it will work. After I hit the final submit button to pay for a one year renewal, I received an e-mail about the renewal. It thanked me for extending my domain name registration to 2004!