[BALUG-Admin] So, joker.com, then?

[Rick Moen]

An aspect of Gandi's process that was a little concerning:

At a certain point, this morning, after I hit the green buttons in 
IWantMyName's customer WebUI, the two domains disappeared from that 
registrar's listings, showing that I now hosted _no_ domains, there.
Er, OK so far....

So, I turned to Gandi's customer WebUI:  It remained unchanged, showing
the indicators previously described of needing to get final release from
the incumbent registrar.  Notably, the customer WebUI _said nothing_
about action required by me elsewhere.  It didn't say "Look at your
e-mail for notice of a link to confirm the transfer, and, if you didn't
get that e-mail, do [X]."

That is concerning, but what is _more_ concerning is what happened next:
A while after I pressed those green buttons over at IWantMyName, the
two "pending" domains _also_ vanished from the Gandi customer WebUI.
Again, _zero_ about looking for an e-mail, or what you should do if you
didn't get the e-mail.

Fortunately, I _did_ have access to my e-mail, looked at my e-mail, and 
saw a pair of e-mails with Subject header "[GANDI] [Action required]
Confirmation of domain name ownership change".  Each described a domain
pending transfer, and gave a link at migrate.gandi.net with a unique
hash, to "complete the process".

At the indicated pages, I was prompted to specify the owning entity,
which I supplied as "Rick Moen Network Consulting".  _Then_, the
transfer completsd.  I've verified that DNS has moved over unchanged and
that public WHOIS is as desired.

One more oddity of configuring information for the domains, in the early
stages of transfer.  I had the option to elect non-private WHOIS for not
only Registrant, Administrative Contact, and Technical Contact, but also
for Billing Contact.  So, I thought, why not?  I toggled that to
"public", too.

I am not surprised to see that the public WHOIS data, however, _omits_
showing Billing Contact at all -- because ISTR that's been the
convention all the way back to early Network Solutions monopoly days.
So, I gather, somewhere deep within Gandi's records, the "private" flag
for Billing Contact is set to "N", but with zero practical effect on the
WHOIS end, for reasons unclear but possibly a global setting in the
WHOIS server software.