On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 11:56:21AM +1200, Peter Mott wrote:
I think our view has been fairly well expressed. We have decided to withdraw from name registration in .nz rather than continue to deal with the domainz / isocnz juggernaut.
I think the overwhelming impression I formed during the time I was looking at the juggernaut in question was that it was designed and implemented as an end-user customer-care system, with a bulk interface bolted on as an afterthought. The bulk interface was correspondingly unpolished, and the designers really seem to have worked under the impression that large agents would use warm bodies pointing and clicking in preference to an automated registration process. Some design issues are: + lack of consistent interface; + continued reliance on e-mail batched submission mechanism, with no consideration given to a real-time interface; + e-mail transaction format which is barely consistent between templates, and which is expensive and non-trivial to parse accurately; + minimal attention paid to security concerns; + inconsistent registry schema (compare normalisation of nameholder contact records with tech contact records); + radically-changed authorisation scheme (per-nameholder rather than per-domain) with fluffy commercial incentive to reducing nameholder id duplication rather than any attempt at a technical solution; + no attempt made to conform to standards (real, de-facto or otherwise) in nomenclature, schema or interface (the use of ICANN terms for Domainz's own business model entities is at best a peculiar smokescreen). Specific migration issues are: + lack of any backwards compatability interface; + lack of useful documentation; + constantly moving goalposts; + arbitrary process of assigning nameholders to agents which has been demonstrated to be inaccurate; + threat of new, improved (i.e. different, presumably non-backwards- compatible) machine interface to Domainz in "phase two". Note that, as usual, I am specifically not making any comment about the network infrastructure which is planned to host the new system. I am not particularly keen to go into these points in any more detail. The iterative process of make-suggestion, bang-head-on-table, make-suggestion, bang-head-on-table is completely unproductive as far as realising any improvement is concerned, and frankly it's expensive on tables. This is specifically not a note which expects a reply from Domainz. I am not interested in any "clarification" of points raised above. "My regards" Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog