2023-11-24 Post IRS release 8.7 notification to registrars

Kia ora!

This is to notify you that after the IRS release 8.7 we were made aware of a change to instantly auto-renew domains that are expired, if they are restored from redemption instead of auto-renew being run by our house keeper process which runs every 5 minutes. This change was undocumented by our software vendor. The changes are described below:

IRS 8.0

  • On restore, from redemption, a domain would be placed into a “registered” state but not actually renewed.

  • Housekeeper would then run between 0 seconds and 5 minutes to auto-renew the domain.

  • Registrars could submit their restore request, the restore report and an explicit renewal together to bypass the auto-renew.

  • This allowed registrars to negate the 45-day auto-renew grace period and to renew in one step for more than one year if the registrant had selected to.

IRS 8.7

  • On restore, from redemption, a domain now instantly auto-renews for one year.

  • Registrars now cannot restore and submit an explicit renewal before auto-renew is run.

  • If a multi-year renewal is required, registrars will need to take into account that auto-renew on restore will automatically renew the domain for one year. They should then submit an explicit renewal for the remaining term required. i.e. the renewal term minus 1 year.

  • For multi-year renewals, this means that if the registrant decides to cancel the renewal, only the last explicit renewal can be cancelled.

These changes have had an impact on registrars in the following 2 scenarios.

  1. If a multi-year restore renewal is required, registrars will need to take into account that there will be an auto-renew on restore, which will instantly renew the domain for one year. They will then need to submit an explicit renewal for the remaining term required. i.e. the renewal term minus 1 year

  2. If Registrars are using domain delete and restore to remove an auto-renew transaction and replace that with an explicit renewal of any term length, this is no longer an option.

We apologise for any impact this has had on your processes and we are working with the vendor to ensure processes are in place so that this does not happen again.

We would like to take this opportunity to remind you also that new releases are available to be tested in the OTE environment prior to being released to production and that it is strongly recommended to test all your processes.

Ngā mihi

Kind regards

.nz team