Updated on 28/10/2021: This used to be one wall of text. I made it all beautiful with headers.
Background
You may or may not know nominet. The .uk domain name registry in the United Kingdom, which was founded by Dr. Willie Black and five others on 14th May 1996 when its predecessor, the “Naming Committee” was unable to deal with the volume of registrations then being sought under the .uk domain.
Nominet
You may as well know that nominet changed their “data quality” standards for registrant contacts effective on 7th May 2014. With one month advance notice. In the event of nominet being unable to verify your registrant details by means of “public database” queries, they sent emails to the registrar and registrant to validate their contact information. Failing to provide nominet with accurate information within a grace period of 30 days after the notification, resulted in your domain registration being SUSPENDED1. I received several such emails for each .co.uk domain I held up until this day. I ignored it and thought it was one of the many spam emails I receive daily, as I didn’t know of nominet at this moment.
It was my mistake
A grave mistake as it turns out. Among other domains my cheret.co.uk ended up being SUSPENDED2 as I failed to validate my details with nominet. As soon as this automatic process did it’s thing3, I received a notification of the suspension. That’s when I started to get nervous. Many of you know, I’m currently heading the development of the footnotes plugin for WordPress. Now with popularity of this particular plugin increasing every day and the project website being hosted at cheret.co.uk/mci I was really keen on getting the domain working again, so many people can inform themselves about the people behind the plugin and the philosophy and all that4. Now I’ve got my act together and calmly researched what went wrong, soon discovering I failed to provide information to nominet. I rather quickly responded to one of the first emails I received from them, created an account, updated my info and emailed my ID for validation of my details. I’m used to these things happening quickly and thought everything would be sorted an hour, maybe two hours later. As it didn’t happen within the expected time, I had to act5.
and a friend helped me out
So I went ahead and asked my best friend living in the UK to transfer the domain over, as I thought a UK citizen will be automatically validated with nominet. I’ve never transferred a domain in a SUSPENDED state before but I didn’t think much of it. The transfer went through rather quickly with the domain still being unusable6. This was late Friday evening so no support staff was available at both companies involved. This meant I had to wait the whole weekend before anything would happen. The transfer in SUSPENDED state even posed a challenge for certain managers on behalf of the registrar I transferred the domain to. Fortunately I have friends who care about my needs a.k.a. domain names and have enough stamina to convince people to get to work on lifting certain SUSPENSIONS of domain name registrations. The end result is that cheret.co.uk became usable on 26th June 20147 whereas the SUSPENSION on other .co.uk domains I own was lifted on 23rd June 2014 through nominet. Patience is a virtue. If I had had patience, I would have had my cheret.co.uk working again 3 days later instead of one week later and somebody would have 12£ more in their pocket.
rendering the website and email service behind the domain name unusable ↩︎
rendering the website and email service behind the domain name unusable ↩︎
which was on 20th June 2014 ↩︎
as the domain was not usable at this point ↩︎
out of sheer desperation I might add ↩︎
as the registration was still SUSPENDED ↩︎
after almost a whole week went by ↩︎