WHOIS results should remain identical regardless of whether the query supplies the domain in lower case, upper case, or a combination of the two.
In the case of Cloudflare domains, sending a WHOIS query with ANY letter of the domain capitalized appends a “No match for [this domain]” message to the result, despite the fact that the correct details appear above that.
This is bad because most casual users will simply read the last bit and presume the domain is unregistered. It will create similar problems for anyone searching the WHOIS record programmatically and filtering for the words “No match for”.
This should be fixed, Cloudflare WHOIS results should be “case agnostic”
Interestingly, my WHOIS client on Linux appears to be lower-casing any query (I found out after trying a MiXeD CaSe query of my domain in Cloudflare, found out that it actually works, then sniffed the query to find out that what I type is not what gets sent…)
So I went ahead and checked the RFCs (5144 for WHOIS, which points to domain name specification at 1035), which does say:
2.3.3. Character Case For all parts of the DNS that are part of the official protocol, all comparisons between character strings (e.g., labels, domain names, etc.) are done in a case-insensitive manner.
So you are of course right, but I can also relate and see how QA could have missed this if their WHOIS client works like mine…
For sure, I don’t fault Cloudflare for not being aware of this. Hopefully, this is a good example of how feedback from a wide base of users can catch these problems.
Yes. As a general rule of thumb, everything regarding domains - including URLs and email addresses - should be handled in a case-insensitive manner. This is doubly important in the case of Cloudflare, because they do tend to express domains fully-capitalized, so, anyone copy n’ pasting is going to run into this “No match for” problem.
