What a day! The long discussed launch of direct registration of a new domain extension in Australia went live today.
Domain registrants can now start to secure their .au domain names.
Before it was domainer.com.au and now it can be domainer.au
In our case, since we have both:
domainer.com.au
and
domainer.net.au
meant that the process to get our domainer.au was a bit more complicated and should be processed in a day or two, as you have to reject one of your tokens before to can get the other one to be auto applied.
auDA did not make the process easy or use a process that has been used by other extension, instead invented a brand new process full of unnecessary complexities.
Unfortunately auDA/Afilias had to roll back some code which made the delegation of all .au domain names registered a manual process instead of being fully automatic like every other domain extension. So domains registered today will be live tomorrow. The manual processing will be done Tuesdays to Saturdays (Afilias working time zone as their techs are not based in Australia and work on US/CAD time zone instead.) Hopefully this will be quickly rectified as not a great user experience for new customers excited to get their .au domains only to be told that they need to wait a day or 3 before their sites can go live.
Apart from that Drop had its first drop auctions for .au domains and 5 .au were picked up by clients. This number is expected to increase each day as more good quality names drop and the need to hand register a .net.au right before the drops to secure the .au rights no longer apply. So those that were actively doing that will now need to place bids for the .au equivalent.
Something to pay extra attention to many have reported receiving emails from Afilias with these subjects:
Subject: Verification email – decline to apply for priority status – ***DOMAIN***
From: AUMEM Technical Support
and
Subject: .au Priority contact ID and Priority authInfo verification for ***DOMAIN***
From: AUMEM Technical Support
This is clearly from: https://priority.auda.org.au/
but submitted by other domain owners, trying to either get your Token or to trick you to “Decline” your token so that they can get your rights to the .au of a contested domain. So take special note and be super careful. We did find this interesting as if there was only one other domain extension in the contested list, meant that they are interested in the .au and hence our clients prices just went up for their rights.
The actual email had this content:
—–
THIS IS SYSTEM GENERATED MESSAGE – PLEASE DO NOT REPLY DIRECTLY TO THIS EMAIL.
Dear Registrant,
On 2022-03-24 00:56:02, we received a request from you to decline your opportunity to apply for priority status for the matching .au direct domain name associated with your existing domain name ***DOMAIN*** via https://priority.auda.org.au.
If this was you, you can decline to apply for priority status or withdraw your application by clicking the following link.
https://priority.auda.org.au/domain-decline/******
If you did not submit this request you can ignore this message.
Note: This action cannot be undone. Once you have confirmed your decline to withdrawal, you will no longer be able to use the domain name you entered as the basis for a priority status application under the Priority Allocation Process
The above link will be active for 48 hours. If you do not complete the process to decline within 48 hours, please resubmit your request at https://priority.auda.org.au.
Sincerely,
.au Technical Support
Email: support@afilias.com.au
Phone: +61-3-9021-6914 (Australia)
Phone: +1-416-619-3038 (North America)
—–
.au is finally live, so quick shout out to our favourite place to get lunch Mr Beau in Beaumaris with their new short domain: http://mrbe.au
Great news… Afilias fixed the delegation issue and .au domains registered are live instantly!! Some serious work must have been done to get such as quick turn around time!