The ability of the system to initiate transfers varies from day to day. If we share our experiences here, we might be able to identify patterns. At the very least, you will be reassured to know that other people are having similar problems, that it isn’t just your account or your particular domains.
Over the weekend, with 34 attempts, I managed to transfer 11 out of 30 domains. My attempts were of varying sizes, sometimes 20 domains at once, at other times just one or two.
Today, with 24 attempts, I managed to transfer zero out of 40 domains (introducing about 20 new domains).
My attempts today were mostly just a few domains at a time, in response to @SamRhea’s suggestion that banks may be rejecting individual domain purchases if there are too many in quick succession. I did not, however, find smaller transfers to be any more effective. I also confirmed with my bank, yet again, that no payment requests were being blocked by them.
Again, please do share your own experiences here, whether you managed to transfer dozens or if all your attempts are failing.
I’m stuck since day 1. And all i want is to transfer a com-domain that is currently registered via Google.
In my case (don’t know, when you receive this error @imappoet) it has nothing to do with payments, because it’s not that CF tries to charge you right after submitting the contact info. The problem is something else and they are trying to resolve it.
If the problem has solved for me, i’ll let you know. Maybe, you are a “victim” of the same problem.
Would you mind retrying the workflow and looking at the Dev Tools (keeping the log since it changes page before you can read anything) for the “transfer” API call? There should be a better explanation.
I would very much appreciate that @Sascha, as I’m sure would any other users having the same problem.
I feel that this is a significant enough problem to justify some sort of official communication from the Registrar team. There are clearly dealing with many problems, but not being able to accept domains into your system should surely be a priority. They should not only get to it sooner (rather than later), but they should also let their users know that they take it seriously.
I believe that they do take it seriously, I personally talked and resolved some issue in previous waves with the PM for Registrar (@SamRhea, if you want to address and/or request things) but they would probably have a list ordered by number of people involved.
I (and others) for example had an issue where the billing system negated the transaction if there were a dedicated certificate active on the domain. Completely unrelated to my payment method and to the actual Registrar product.
Yeah, I agree, I am confident that payments are not the problem.
In fact, payments are the one part of the process where they actually have informative error message: early on, I had entered the wrong expiry date for my credit card and the system let me know exactly what the problem was when I tried to initiate my first transfer.
I wish the rest of the process would give some sort of clue about the type of failures it is having.
Yeah, I figure they must be aware that it is important, what I am saying is that it is also important to express to your users.
Yeah, I have seen that @SamRhea was good at improving the situation where users with more than 20 sites on Cloudflare could not use the registrar system at all, he increased that limit to 250 sites.
I get that they are busy, but as it appears that they do not know much about how domain owners operate or what they need, that feedback could be of value to them, it might be worth their while to encourage it.
The list order thing I believe is due to the fact that when they list they don’t have the actual expiry date available. They will fix that, but gathering millions of expiry dates is unreasonable at the moment… The UI will be improved upon and iterated on.
They are at the first stages of beta rollout, give them some time. If you need clean UIs you can hold off one year, wait and see at your current registrar.
… but the expiry date is included right there in the list
I think this is a purely UI problem, in the sense that presenting that same list, with no more than the data it currently contains, but using a re-orderable table, would instantly boost its usefulness, as would a simple checkbox to mass select or deselect all the domains in the list.
What I am trying to do is give clear, strong feedback that reflects how important this stuff is for actual users. I do that because I want Cloudflare to be a realistic alternative to the existing registrars. I do not agree that they will automatically get this stuff right over time, not without feedback from experienced domain owners.
It was very clear to me, just by looking at the initial design decisions they have made, that no-one on the team really understands how most domain owners operate, that they did not seek out that knowledge and that they did not have the humility to look at how other registrars have solved the same problems. I to add my feedback to the mix because this is stuff I have been dealing with daily for over two decades, I want to at least give them the option to consider why some decisions make their system worse than it needs to be.
Yes, I could have just waited a year at my current registrar, no problem, but I think you are wrong to presume that will magically have a better UI by then. A far more likely evolution, if I had not got involved, is that they would still be unusable by users with more than 20 sites on Cloudflare, and the only people keeping their domains here would be those to whom saving 50 cents a year is more important than usability (which, to be fair, will be enough people for the project to be considered a success).
If I remember correctly they do an async API call there to get those, they would have to reorder the list after having it already displayed. They should maybe allow for it to be reordered.
More or less, agreed.
We all do, they included. I really hope @SamRhea reads this and takes it into consideration. I would imagine getting things working (and with 200+ TLDs isn’t all that easy I presume) is priority number 1, then usability and polishing touches.
Sam here. Lots to cover in this thread, so I’ll do my best to respond to each point.
Mystery failures where “Something went wrong”
I agree - this is a really inconvenient and annoying error after going through the trouble of entering auth codes and unlocking domains. While several thousand domains have transferred to Cloudflare successfully since launch, we’ve seen this error impact a small percentage of transfers. It seems more concentrated within a given account, which is why a single account would have a higher proportion impacted. Additionally, domains with dedicated certificate subscriptions tend to hit this error.
We’ve identified a fix for this issue and will be deploying that change in the next couple days, probably as early as this afternoon. The HAR files submitted allowed us to isolate what was failing and address it, and we’re grateful for those that sent the details!
We are still seeing some cases where card issuers reject multiple independent charges, but that is unrelated to what we believe is causing this error for those reporting it in this thread.
Manual domain selection / domain listing
We understand that you might not want to move every domain over at the same time, but removing each domain manually is a chore. We’re looking at adding that feature soon. Making this more useable for different types of domain portfolios is a priority.
Expiration date
WHOIS responses contain two expiration date fields - one in the primary response and the other in the contact-specific response. The contact-specific response was using an incorrect value. We’re deploying a fix for this as we speak, should be available in the next couple hours.
Thanks for the feedback and commentary; it’s valuable. We’re definitely committed to making this system useful and intuitive for domain owners of all sizes.
Thanks for the update @Sascha, good to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel, the Registrar team are clearly making progress in mopping up the remaining problems.
I tried again but am still getting 422 (Unprocessable Entity) responses.
I submitted a support ticket two days ago, and have sent a HAR file, hopefully someone at Cloudflare will see the ticket and be able figure out why their system is no longer able to process my domains. Your result gives me a lot of hope
