OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Yesterday I made a post about a couple of Moniker problems I had. The post was triggered by an email invoice I got for a domain name renewal. I had let the domain expire of the 6th of May. Many people have received this renewal invoice for domains that have expired 1-2 months back. But that was only the beginning of the problems me and others are facing. At least I don’t have any domains expiring in June as I followed my own advice.
First of all the support is not responding. I submitted 2 tickets yesterday and have not heard back. I don’t have the option of calling and waiting for hours on the phone as I am from Greece. Actually no one can wait for hours on the phone…
Now let’s see one of the most important problems: the disappearing domains. Some domains have disappeared from user account for various reasons. I can imagine everything went wrong. The old Moniker system had enough bugs already and transferring a broken system to another broken system is simply impossible.
Some expired domains have disappeared while others that have been expired for months, in redemption or transferred out still appear in accounts.
But there is some other category of disappearing domains. The ones people have won and have been transferred to their Network Solutions accounts. Before the change to the New Moniker I noticed a small banner in my account informing about this:
So Network Solutions probably now has some of your missing domain names. These are the domains that were won at Snapnames. I am missing one domain that is registered with the registrar OctopusDomains. I checked one of my Network Solutions accounts and it’s not in there. Not sure where it is…
And of course some domains are showing the wrong whois details. This is quite frightening. Although my .org domains appears in my Moniker control panel and has the correct contact handle it is shown as owned by Moniker. I tried to update whois by making a small change and control panel says that the job is pending. This is a domain registered with a registrar named BetterThanAverageDomains and managed by Moniker. That could seem like an ownership change in a UDRP. This is very bad!
I wrote yesterday that Moniker is missing the auto-expire option at the renewal section. It only has the auto-renew and auto-delete option as we speak. Here are some more of the changes and problems that I noticed in a few minutes of working with the new control panel today:
- You now have a new Account ID. You can still login with the account username. Moniker did not informed customers about this important change.
- The “Transaction History” is completely empty.
- IP log does not even work.
- The “Invoices” section contains no invoices. That is 1 thing I missed doing before the change and I will regret it. I am missing 2 invoices from May and I need them for my tax office.
- Paypal payments don’t work. I got this message:
“We could not reach the PayPal payment gateway.
Please try again later!
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.” - Actually I am not sure if credit card payments are working. The domain that was supposedly renewed using my credit card is not in my account.
- We have no bank transfer details and I won’t send money to the old account because that could be different too.
- You can’t change your password: “This option is only available for the main user of this account.”
- Some people complained about the domain pricing. Actually they liked the wrong pricing displayed! This is what I see in my account now: .com: $ 9.09 Price excl. VAT
- My various contact templates have all disappeared. I am only left with the one that Moniker created from my default account profile. So probably whois in my 500 Moniker domains is messed up.
- There is “Delete Immediately” option that is useful but very dangerous at the same time. There should be 2-step authentication to access this feature.
- Actually 2-step authentication should be used for accessing the account anyway…
- gTLD Pre-Registrations don’t work.
- Of course there in no way to get auth codes in bulk as I predicted. Someone said that the auth codes have changed with the New Moniker. I have checked that yet.
- I am not sure if you can renew domains using the account balance. Has anyone renewed a domain successfully?
- Can anyone register new domains? Why would you do that at Moniker? 🙂
- Bulk domain name unlock and bulk nameserver change is a mess.
- My domains show an arbitrary creation date in whois. Actually it might be the date from when I originally transfer the domain into Moniker. DomainTools displays the wrong creation date that it gets from Moniker. My original creation is actually shown correctly at internic.net.
- The Moniker Escrow will be migrated to the Snapnames Escrow within the next 2 weeks.
- Did I miss anything? I am sure I did!
This is the Moniker announcement from yesterday:
To All Moniker Customers,
This past weekend we launched a completely new Moniker experience which involved the release of an entirely new Moniker website and customer portal. Our goal is to increase the products and services we offer while at the same time maintaining a robust set of tools that enable clients to effectively manage their Web properties in a single place.
During this migration period unfortunately there appear to be some instances where clients have been charged for renewals they did not authorize, and cases in which domains are not visible in a customer’s account. We want you to know unauthorized charges of domains will be refunded as soon as possible. In addition, if you are missing domains in your account, they are not lost; they are not appearing for technical reasons which should be resolved in the next 24-48 hours.
As you can imagine, these issues have caused a significant increase in call volume to our support staff and we are working diligently to resolve each and every case. We are working around the clock to resolve your questions and concerns expeditiously.
We understand the concerns our customers are facing and want you to know that if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please contact support at:
Email: getsupport@moniker.com
Phone:
Toll free in the U.S. and Canada: 800-688-6311
Outside the U.S. and Canada: 954-607-1294
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How long before Icann intervenes? The registar has experienced data loss, customers cannot renew domain names, some say domains have been transferred to other registrars without permission. I cannot renew domain names or even get the AUTH codes to transfer out. If ICANN doesn’t intervene here, then when would it?
ICANN is very slow. By the time they do anything half the domains will be expired.
Another major problem. I have portfolio lock on my account. Paid $124 for it last year. It means that changes can’t take place without answering 2 secret questions.
So now I try and get an auth code for transfer, and it won’t let me do it because the Portfolio lock is active. But when I try and deactivate the lock, its submits a job into the queue then the status changes to “fail”.
in other words I am locked out from making any changes. Raised a ticket yesterday. nada response so far.
As it happens, this portfolio lock itself is up for renewal in a few days, but i can’t change the auto-renewal status of it, because.. i can’t switch the portfolio lock off to do it.
With credit card payments still failing i tried to fund the account with $1k, it ended up taking 1k EUR (i didn’t notice the currency symbol) – and now those funds have gone from my paypal account, but sit in a status at paypal of “unclaimed”.
It’s a proper fuck up. Where is support? I bet they all went off home at 5pm yesterday.
Gary nothing seems to work. I wouldn’t try to make any changes for the next 2-3 days but at least I don’t have any expiring
domains for a month.
Their must have not connected their paypal account properly with the new system.
And yes they went home. Why shouldn’t they? 🙁
From Moniker’s Website: “We are working around the clock to resolve your questions and concerns expeditiously.”
No, you’re not. You don’t answer the phones. You don’t respond to trouble tickets–I have one 24 hours old now.
How about this? Get your website back online so I can get the AUTH codes. You people aren’t fit to run a registrar.
Sadly, i have my best domains at moniker from back in the monte days…i got on the phone with them and had to provide a list of the missing domains (shouldn’t they know what doing should be in the account?!) and they say they are going to put them back but of course, it seems nothing has happened yet. the woman on the phone was helpful ( she said the status of delete on expiraton doesn’t actually delete them, that we should still have 35 days after expiry to renew and that paypal doesn’t work at all, should be up in 24-48 hours) but that doesn’t change how screwed up a once perfectly fine registrar is. and yeah, i had some domains moved to a networksolutions account i didn’t even know i had. the only i got access to it was doing a forgot ID and forgot password retrieval. a one mighty empire has crumbled. where to move to now?
Fabulous.com or Dynadot.com.
There are more options if you search…
DOMAINS HAVE TO BE MANAGED AS EURID DOES.
YOU MUST TO BE ABLE TO TAKE THE AUTH CODE DIRECTLY FROM THE REGISTRY, AS YOU CAN DO WITH EURID FOR .EU DOMAINS.
PERIOD.
This is only a small problem, but yesterday on my iPhone I registered a new domain and it did not give me the option to choose how I wanted to pay (I wanted to use the credit balance already in my Moniker account), and it did not tell me how I paid for it afterwards. It emailed me an invoice indicating I needed to wire the money to pay the invoice, yet the domain showed in my account so that did not seem correct. I emailed support but they have not responded yet.
Eric, others have the same problems. I don’t think that anything works right at Moniker and that is why it is down for maintenance again.
I have registered OccupyMoniker.com / org and MonikerWatch.com /org
I hope they get their act together and this doesn’t turn out to be another RegisterFly fiasco in case any of you remember that one. Tens of thousands of name were lost, deleted or vanished. I lost over 300 domains in that mess. Supposedly ICANN has implemented procedures for warehousing whois data so this wouldn’t happen again.
Just to be on the safe side if anyone out there would like to get involved in getting the word out, with enough interest and assistance (as I am not a blogger) i would consider creating a site and spreading the word. You may email to get on list to: jaymiany99@gmail.com
Moniker Customer
Does anyone notice problems with domain privacy getting undone? I had it on most all of my domains and now nearly all of them show my personal info in public when I look them up in domaintools. The only domains that still seem to have domain privacy are my .CN. This is disconcerting and now I assume these are forever associated with my personal name and address in public.
I noticed the privacy thing missing too. I first assumed that I had forgot to renew it. But it seems like it is their screw up. To make matters worse, I can’t login to my account I don’t remember my ‘Customer ID’ if I ever had one. I do have my Account number though. Does anyone know how to get your customer id?
@Jeff
Did you got support from Moniker yet. I have the same problem, can not log in to moniker and Moniker does not reply my support email.Suck.
Is there anything anyone can do? I am beyond frustrated….does anyone actually work there?
Are you locked out of your account? Or is it something else?
Locked out since Friday 7th of November. I wrote Moniker about my problems right away and received an answer ~25 hours later on Saturday 8th of October with the following message:
“There is currently activity in your account that needs to be verified. Until verified the account will be locked. Please verify your account details so we can complete verification via this case.”
I provided the requested validation data right away. Moniker has turned silent ever since. On Tuesday 11th of November I still cannot login. Though, I can reset the password via “http://moniker.com/service/forgot-password” using my old Username (new passwords are emailed to me then; still logins fail with them) but not with my new 8 digit custom ID.
Over the last 2 years I always logged in from the very same IP. What a mess. Can anyone help me? It is now 4+ days since I’ve been locked out…
I know that you can’t log in but do the 2 accounts contain the same domains?
I don’t know where you are located but maybe you can try and call them.
I’m in Europe. I tried to call them but it seems you only can talk to a machine for “lock out” scenarios; it seems they record the validation data then (and I’ve already sent them this validation data via the open support case via email on Saturday 8th of November as requested).
I only have one Moniker account. But it seems you can access your Moniker account with two set of credentials now:
a) Either with your old Username (a username of your choice).
b) Moniker recently (or not so recently?) replaced this old Username with a 8 digit Customer ID.
Quote from the email I got from moniker on Saturday: “We apologize for the confusion. Your 8 digit customer ID is your main account number. It is also listed as “USERNAME” when completing a password reset.
The sub user accounts were created when we changed platforms June 2nd, 2014. Our new system requires 8 digit account numbers. However our accounts were 4-6 digits along with some clients also using an alternative usernames. The sub user accounts were moved over to allow previous clients like yourself to still have access to manage domains with previous credentials. ”
Thus:
a) sub accounts = old Usernames (with old credentials)
b) 8 digit Customer ID = the new preferred way to perform logins
As far as I understood both should provide access to the same account. Still I cannot login with either of these credentials. On the other side I can reset my password at “http://moniker.com/service/forgot-password” with a) (my old Username) but now with b) (the 8 digit customer ID).
🙁
I am in Europe too and I am glad I am not locked out.
They sort of replaced the old username with the new customer ID back in June when they installed the new system and control panel.
But they kept the old one as a sub-account. Sub-account could potentially be used to contain a subset of the total of the domains of the main account. But the default was to be the same.
It seems that they have locked your main account and that will not allow access to all sub-accounts.
Yes. And of course I didn’t ever login since this change was applied until last Friday. I then used the wrong combination of credentials once or twice.
Have you any idea how long it might take until they sort this out and unlock my main account again? I guess I will wait for one or two more days and will then start another support request. As I moved my domains to Moniker in 2011 in 2012 their support was very fast. It never took more than 24h to get an answer. I very liked Moniker back then but after this experience…
Probably the 2 bad log in attempts triggered the lock.
I don’t know what is going on at Moniker. They are pretty bad.
By 2011 I had moved away 95% of my domains from Moniker.
They were already a shadow of what they once were in 2005.
Thanks for posting this Robert, I was looking everywhere to add a payment option..under username account =/
I waited about 15 minutes on the phone today. Then after a 5 minute conversation (various data checks; try to reset your pwd now; try to login; oh..wait.. try now once more) I could access my account again. 🙂
Glad to hear this Robert.
Moniker announced a new COO today.
Maybe there is something changing by I am gone.