After a decade at Uniregistry as my domain registrar of choice, I’ve been migrating my portfolio elsewhere.
The acquisition of Uniregistry by GoDaddy presents complex issues such as the forced addition of Uni domains to Afternic, with no direct management of these listings via the Uni Market.
Currently, I’m transferring domain names (and registering new domains) at Sav.com, with more than 25% of my portfolio already there. As domains at Uni reach expiration, I move them to Sav.com.
While the Sav platform is not polished, any bugs that I’ve reported have been ironed out and there are more improvements in the pipeline. Domain pricing at Sav is also very competitive and transfers from Uniregistry take a couple of hours to complete.
By default, Uniregistry generates complex auth codes that contain letters, numbers and symbols. From a domain security standpoint, that’s great. However, certain symbols that are used in programming can pose issues with some receiving registrars. When that happened in the past, Sav took care of the glitch.
However, there is an existing glitch with Uniregistry auth codes that begin with the equal sign (“=”) and it’s not related to the gaining registrar but it manifests when exporting these codes from Uniregistry in bulk, as an Excel spreadsheet.
Consider the following auth code:
=)skK2<ft.@IKo*j
When exported as an Excel document the cell that contains it will change into an error in Excel; the same error will affect Apache OpenOffice as well.
That’s because in these spreadsheet applications the equal sign initiates a formula or calculation. Unfortunately, there is no way to fix this other than to change the auth code at Uniregistry and paste the new code into the Excel document, updating that particular entry. Just make sure the new code doesn’t begin with a “=” once again!
In a nutshell: Check that the auth codes at Uniregistry do not begin with an equal sign before uploading that document to Sav for bulk domain transfers.
Ran into a similar bug when transferring just one name, years ago. I had copy-and-pasted an auth code to the buyer into an email, when a domain was sold. The formatting of the email program changed the code and he received it as something different that didn’t work. I think I finally put it in a text document and attached that to an email.