Hello Luis, On 22/01/2016 18:18, Luis E. Muñoz wrote:
On 22 Jan 2016, at 2:35, Thomas Corte wrote:
While, from a purist's standpoint, it seems entirely out of scope for registries, it does account for the fact that the end of the registrant's paid service period with the /registrar/ is pretty much the /only/ date the registrant needs to know.
I see things a bit differently.
The issue at hand is that in essence, we have two completely separate databases tracking the same object (the domain name) using (hopefully) the same rules to ascertain its life-cycle and expose it to the public, including the registrant.
IMO, the two databases operate in rough agreement most of the time regarding the expiry date. Disagreement usually happens around the auto-renew date because the two databases might very well update their status at different times creating a window of inconsistency.
It's not just a matter of how auto-renewals are processed; the agreement highly depends on the registrar's billing policy. As an example, our own registrar system usually starts a 2-year payment cycle for a domain on the day the domain enters our system. For a newly created domain, this means that the expiration dates will be identical. However, for transferred-in domains it could be vastly different. Let's say a domain is created by a different registrar on January 1st, 2016 with a 1-year period (expiring on 2017-01-01). It is then transferred to us on July 1st, 2016, meaning that our registrar (2-year) payment cycle starts on 2016-07-01 and ends on 2018-07-01. The domain is renewed by one year at the registry as part of the transfer, setting its registry expiration date to 2018-01-01. However, our *registrar* expiration date is 2018-07-01, six months later. Displaying it on the registry Whois would allow the registrant to ascertain that his domain is safe until 2018-07-01, since it is paid until then. Currently, what our registrar system does instead is extend the domain by another year (bumping the registry expiration date to 2019-01-01), so that the registrant won't worry about losing it on 2018-01-01. This premature renewal could be avoided with the proposed extension. Best regards, Thomas -- TANGO REGISTRY SERVICES® Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH Thomas Corte Technologiepark Phone: +49 231 9703-222 Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 D-44227 Dortmund E-Mail: Thomas.Corte@knipp.de Germany