Moniker.com's new and revamped interface is a disaster

http://jacquesmattheij.com/moniker-com-is-being-murdered

by Confusion • 12 years ago

45 44 12 years ago

hackerboos• 12 years ago

The new Moniker looks a lot like the new Namecheap - lots of change and a poorer user experience.

kyle_t• 12 years ago

^ This. Ever since Namecheap went through their 'rebranding' the site has been slow and at times completely unusable. I consistently get timeouts when performing basic tasks. The old site was ugly but it worked. The new site is slightly less ugly and it barely works. They had a lot of goodwill built up which they are slowly chipping away at.

jeremymcanally• 12 years ago

Wow, that's insane. But that result is fairly typical when a feisty new CEO hands down an ill-defined "new vision" for an existing product, and the people left to implement it have to figure out what that looks like. But it sounds like no one even tested core functionality at all, which is sort of scary for something as infrastructure-y as a domain registrar!

I moved most of my stuff to IWantMyName and haven't looked back. Super smooth experience and they add new TLD's often. My initial attraction was .io registration that didn't take a few weeks, but I've since been doing most of my .com/.net/.org registrations there, too.

One day I'll stop being lazy and move everything off GoDaddy over there. :)

RexRollman• 12 years ago

Really, this is more an indictment of web based interfaces than anything: users have no control. At least with regular software you can generally continue to use the old version if you don't like the new version.

The most recent example of a bad redesign, in my opinion, was Flickr. The new interface is awful and I have actually left the site because of it.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

That's an interesting point, I had not thought of that. I always think of this from the point of view of the webmaster, ease of change after launch seems like a plus to me. But the way you put it I can see that there is a significant downside to this as well (and I'm very well prepared by Moniker to see that downside sharply).

dingdingdang• 12 years ago

This is a fundamental and very true point - as long as the web remains as inanely centralized as it is presently there will never be stability/usability on par with desktop applications. Not because web-apps are worse than desktop-apps but because users can never manage to build up their skill sets before the web-apps are changed and "improved": in conclusion this situation is the bane of sanity and the course of the rise of the Slow Web movement!

epaladin• 12 years ago

I moved to Moniker a couple years ago since there was so much praise for it on Slashdot. I didn't check out the new interface yet. I don't have that many domains, but if they're so interested in obliterating their core functionality for no real reason, I think I'll play it safe and look into migrating registrars.

erichurkman• 12 years ago

I'm in the same boat. A handful of domains, moved there because of Slashdot. If I hadn't seen this story on HN, I could have lost all of my domains upon their expiration: my contact email reverted to an email I haven't used in years and it appears my credit card reverted to an old (now invalid) number.

The new interface is awful, too.

Do any registrars have decent interfaces?

whichdan• 12 years ago

I just migrated from Moniker to eNom after having used them for years. Their support is abysmal. Two weeks for them to manually change a nameserver since the web interface wasn't working properly, and another full week for them to remove a domain from my account that I had transferred out, yet was still receiving pending deletion notices for.

ecaron• 12 years ago

In all fairness, their old interface was a disaster too. From their confusingly interconnected upsells, to DNS management, to renewals - its only my distaste for GoDaddy's misogynistic attitude that's kept me from crawling back (and hatred from transferring domains from finding something new #theDevilYouKnow)

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

The old interface had two killer features that the new one lacks: it worked, and I knew how to use it.

thaumaturgy• 12 years ago

I don't know if you're part of the "oh, users just hate change" crowd, but I kind of hope more software developers get bit by nonsense changes to interfaces. What you're saying here is exactly what we hear, all the time, from Firefox and Chrome and Office and online services users.

A shame about Moniker BTW. The registrar I've been with since around 2001 has also recently made a mess of things.

nullrouted• 12 years ago

Moniker has been a disaster since Monte left and that was no secret. All you had to do was look at the forums or read some of the posts on the domain blogs. Do yourself a favor and move your names out now.

I would recommend:

www.dynadot.com

www.uniregistry.com

www.namecheap.com

www.pairnic.com

www.dyn.com

www.name.com

josephb• 12 years ago

I've found namesilo.com to be a decent registrar. Growing at a rate, which is good to see.

cmder• 12 years ago

I'm on namesilo as well. Going well so far.

rafaelm2• 12 years ago

I see lots of recommendations for Uniregstry and I created an account with them, but I'm still a bit wary since they are practically a new registrar. I know Frank Schilling is a co-founder so I'm going to give them a shot any way.

pgrote• 12 years ago

The CEO responded to reports of issues in an interview:

http://domainnamewire.com/2014/06/05/moniker-ceo-bonnie-witt...

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

"Moniker formerly operated off a legacy code base built on outdated technology that would not support the introduction of new products and services in line with our goals."

I hope their goals include long term survival, the way they are going about it I really wonder what sort of 'introduction of new products' would warrant a non-incremental approach like this.

I've moved over a website a few years ago under heavy use (much heavier than monikers ever would see) without the users noticing the switch had even happened.

This was totally uncalled for and plays fast and loose with the moniker brand as well as with the customers who typically depend on moniker to deliver.

The comments section underneath that article is absolutely terrible.

tragic• 12 years ago

Sometimes this can be a good thing but imagine Microsoft would re-arrange all the items in the menu system for ‘Word’ at random and would rename a couple for good measure.

Perish the thought!

rafaelm2• 12 years ago

It seems like they did not even test the new system. I participate in two of the most popular domainer forums and there are stories of people losing domains they had in their accounts, double and triple charges to credit cards, whois privacy deactivated,etc,etc. Their website was down for around 2 days and there's lots of people that lost domains because they were unable to renew them. It's a huge mess. Some people had to block their credit cards with their bank because they were getting hammered with charges.

I was charged for one domain that was not supposed to be renewed (I was transferring it out). Now I have to deal with their abysmal customer services.

To add insult to injury, they posted a half-assed statement on their website and social media accounts and left it at that.

Their previous interface was very simple, sometimes a bit awkward to use but it worked and had no fancy animations,transitions,etc.

Unfortunately it seems that most registrars lack good UX designers. Namecheap's recent re-design is also a mess. They added some fancy sliding menus and animations on top of their old design and made it even more confusing. But at least their system works.

daenz• 12 years ago

I was charged for one domain that was not supposed to be renewed (I was transferring it out). Now I have to deal with their abysmal customer services.

You're not the only one. I was pissed to see my intentionally-expiring domains charged, and the ones I wanted to renew NOT charged(!). Didn't help that the ones I wanted to keep were literally expiring in days, and nobody at Moniker seemed to be responding to tickets. As soon as I find a good alternative, I'm out. This is unacceptable for a business.

derefr• 12 years ago

Namecheap's recent re-design is also a mess. They added some fancy sliding menus and animations on top of their old design and made it even more confusing. But at least their system works.

Eh, Namecheap didn't really do a redesign (of their service); once you hit the domain management pages it's the same old 1995-looking views embedded in their new layout. It's just the sales funnel pages that changed.

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

I returned to this thread to comment on Namecheap. I see there are now a few places I might reply.

The Namecheap redesign originally struck me as "design for design's sake" and it continues to do so. A bit more than just the front/"funnel" pages, it also impacted some of the menus and the cart and checkout pages.

With regard to the front pages, I found it no improvement. Some form of "Bootstrap-ification" or whatever that served primarily to hide things rather than to expose them -- both to me, a longstanding user, but also I suspect to a fair fraction of new users.

Checkout also was initially more opaque, although that seems to have been improved a bit since then. (Among other things, the first time post-design, finding and renewing an associated "WhoisGuard" registration was a PITA game of hide-and-seek.)

I found the redesign to be yet one more example of what I consider to be the current, mistaken over-influence of "Design" and "Designers". Taking "stuff that works" and "prettying it up" while making it: Harder to actually see; harder to actually use; more bug prone; less responsive (as opposed to "responsive"); etc.

There are plenty of good redesigns. But there are plenty of "redesigns for redesigns' sake" that should be stopped before they are started.

The other day, I heard someone apply the Hippocratic Oath to an element of software/systems design, and I found myself agreeing: "First, do no harm."

In Namecheap's case, I can understand the design to update a distinctly "old school" appearance. But, as has been pointed out, the older design worked. Keeping things working, and clear, should have been a primary -- first -- requirement of the redesign. They didn't fail entirely in that regard, but they certainly annoyed.

Also, the redesign did look more than a bit like someone "slapped" a Bootstrap theme or similar onto the site. Maybe it looks better particularly on phones and tablets than the old site. But I didn't/don't find it particularly attractive. If I'm going to devolve into discussing its "Design", I think they could have done a fair amount better.

Anywho, the site is working, and on the rare occasion when I need customer support, they've always been very responsive via IM (integrated into the site).

Setting Namecheap aside, I hope that "the Web" in general, or at least the parts I care about, can get past this apparent outsized influence of... "Design" (/Craig-Ferguson-dramatic-expression-mode).

P.S. While I'm here, I'll just add: Darn it, Namecheap. "autocomplete off" your credit card security code field!!! You got the message about the credit card number field, but this change remains needed and outstanding (and has carried over through the design change).

robalfonso4• 12 years ago

I'm in the registrar space (not affiliated with moniker at all). I will tell you what the real issue is. New gTLD's. (think .web,.app,.house,.car,etc) They have forced everyone to at minimum update their provisioning and billing systems. Some had older and crustier systems than others so its not surprising to see this at all.

Once you update, its hard to make sure you caught every single business rule and weird edge case from your old system and given many of the ccTLD's and gTLD's all have slightly different ways of handling things (.eu domains have no admin contact, .be domains must actually be renewed 30 days before they expire or you lose it) its quite the nightmare and if its a really old system, those tweaks are not evident.

Testing is also quite difficult as the ot&e environments the registries provide are 1) not exactly like their live system 2) require you to create a domain in order to do anything else. So in order to test your new system with actual data, you need to create every single domain in your live system on test. Then issue the commands to put it in exactly the same state as live, however, you cannot mirror a domain perfectly as sometimes its state is set by the registry for legal issues (udrp,etc). It would be much simpler if they just copied live to their sandbox periodically.

I'm not defending them, their launch could have definitely gone much better, but I've been in their shoes and I feel for the tech folks there who are probably spending a lot of late nights at the office and working weekends right now.

boobsbr• 12 years ago

Once you update, its hard to make sure you caught every single business rule and weird edge case from your old system

One of the reasons we're trying to migrate our rules to a rules engine. They're scattered across pages, Javascript, controllers, services and DAOs...

No one knows all the business rules of the system, not even the BAs.

robalfonso4• 12 years ago

Exactly, we obscure all the weird registry stuff behind an object it figures out what it needs to do that's different. Billing system is the same way. Though the real difficulty is that so much of it is configuration (in the registrar space). Piles and piles of xyz happens on day 30 for this tld, day 5 for this one,etc. Also of interest is that not all registries even support the standard set of commands for updating domains/contacts/nameservers which is quite obnoxious.

sanderjd• 12 years ago

It seems like the hardest (or maybe just most tedious) part of this sort of thing is keeping the rules on the front-end and the rules on the back-end consistent. Obviously the back-end needs to be the canonical source of truth, but it's nicer for the user if the front-end knows the rules too so that it can do the right thing prior to a full request cycle. I'd be interested to know if you've come up with a good solution to this, because I haven't found any that are very satisfying.

larrys2• 12 years ago

".be domains must actually be renewed 30 days before they expire or you lose it"

(In the space as well). I think I would point out here what you are (probably) referring to which may not be obvious to HN readers by "must actually be renewed".

Domains in .com .net .org .info are auto renewed at the registry level.

It's then up to the registrar to delete them if the customer doesn't want the name. With cnoi they have 45 days to do so a grace period that they typically extend to their customers.

I'm assuming (since I'm not familiar with .be in particular) that in that cctld a registrar must proactively renew a name prior to expiration or lose the name.

Edit: fixed gtld to cctld

robalfonso4• 12 years ago

This is correct. I'm referring to the registrar-registry relationship and not customer-registrar relationship.

In .com,.net,.org for example auto renew occurs at 12am the day of expiration. However, for some of the odd ones like .be if you haven't issued a renew command 30 days prior to expiration then its the same as issuing a delete on the day of expiration and have it immediately take effect (normally domains go into pendingDelete status for a limited amount of time before actually being deleted). Also to clarify .be is a ccTLD not a gTLD and so they have a different set of standards and rules as far as ICANN is concerned.

I would love it if all domains would just auto renew by the registry and we'd send the delete command if customers didn't want them. Its what I want for christmas :)

esw• 12 years ago

I was about to pull the trigger with eNom as a reseller before I read this. Any recommendations? I'm currently using OpenSRS.

SkyMarshal2• 12 years ago

If UI/UX is your primary concern, check out Name.com. One of the best UI/UX's on the web, period, much less among registrars. Perfectly Ajax-ified, eg, not too much not too little, lots of attention to detail and every little thing just works the way you'd expect.

That said, they supported SOPA and have been caught in the past redirecting unused subdomains of registered domains. I switched to Namecheap and Gandi.net as a result, but still Pine over Name.com's UI/UX. I rank it up there with Gmail.

rgbrenner• 12 years ago

Where did you get that they supported SOPA? (This is important to me.. I have about 30 domains at name.com)

I found this, which seems to indicate the opposite: http://www.name.com/blog/general/domains/2011/12/it-aint-abo...

SkyMarshal2• 12 years ago

Hmmm, not finding it now, only Name.com's blog posts opposing SOPA at the time. Maybe I'm hallucinating, or maybe their opposition to SOPA was only lukewarm and Namecheap's more aggressive stance got them all the credit. Not sure now, but they were my main registrar then and something about the SOPA was the last straw that got me to move my domains. Will try to remember what and post it if I do.

ams6110• 12 years ago

imagine Microsoft would re-arrange all the items in the menu system for ‘Word’ at random and would rename a couple for good measure

Um, they did exactly that when they changed from their traditional menus to the "ribbon." That's when I gave up on MS Office.

colanderman• 12 years ago

imagine Microsoft would re-arrange all the items in the menu system for ‘Word’ at random

You laugh but they actually did this. In realtime. Behold adaptive menus: http://www.ehow.com/facts_7167433_adaptive-menu-windows-offi...

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

Truth is stranger than fiction. Consider me totally stunned.

ccozan• 12 years ago

Well, yes, but this is not at all random. They simply sorted the items in menu by the usage.

I am personally no user of Windows, but I saw at my customers and none had any issue with it. I guess it had some kind of "speed-up" effect, and was of course customized to each user.

arfliw2• 12 years ago

wow - agree 100%. what did they do?!

i needed to renew a domain, just logged in and dug around in the interface for at least ten minutes and i still can't figure out how to do it. can somebody help me? how can i manually renew a domain right now? not set it to auto-renew but renew it and pay now.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

I haven't figured this part out yet. I've been billed for 10 domains but they are all listed as 'payment pending'. It's completely crazy. If you figure any of this out please post here, I promise to do the same.

arfliw2• 12 years ago

What a PITA this interface is...

This explains how to renew domains:

http://wiki.moniker.com/index.php/Faq:renewdomain

The credit card I have on file is old so the payment didn't process, but it created an invoice. I was then able to go to 'Payment Options' in the sidebar and click 'PayPal' and then pay the invoice. That renewed the domain instantly (or actually, within about 10 minutes after I received the emails).

Be sure to set all of the domains you don't wish to auto renew to 'delete at expiration' or they'll auto bill your credit card on file. They reset them all to auto renew by default.

ayb• 12 years ago

I've been using Moniker since 2006 and the change has been pretty frustrating.

I also noticed that they changed the pricing for privacy from the $1 I've been paying for years to $4. All the reps that got me the pricing are long gone and no one from support has responded to my request to fix the pricing.

I'm nervous to transfer a few hundred domains to a new registrar but given what I'm seeing I don't know how much longer I can tolerate what Moniker is doing.

joelrunyon• 12 years ago

When did "design" become more important than "works." Namecheap did a big redesign as well recently & while it didn't "break" anything, it didn't really add any value besides a new coat of paint.

Moniker.com's new and revamped interface is a disaster

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