The Dan.com to Afternic migration is a bit of a mess

Despite the description, you don’t have control over how your listings migrate.

Be careful before you click that button.

I previously wrote about how I was opting out of the Dan.com-to-Afternic migration. I stopped using Dan.com a while ago and list everything at Afternic, so I didn’t think it made sense to migrate.

But I went ahead and downloaded my data from Dan.com. When I did that, I found an issue that meant an account migration might be warranted.

The domain download shows the current status of your domains. It doesn’t explain what they mean, but here’s a handy key:

• active_listing – This means the domain is listed in Afternic because the domain is syndicated from your Dan account
• already_listed – The domain is already on Afternic because you listed it there directly
• not_listed – Whatever this is, it’s incorrect. Many of the domains on my spreadsheet that showed not_listed were listed on Afternic, but some weren’t
• processing_listing – I’m not sure, but these are domains I let expire some time ago

It was the first bucket that gave me pause. Apparently, I had some domains listed on Dan that weren’t listed directly on Afternic. It seemed like the easiest way to move them was to migrate my account to Afternic.

Dan.com offers two migration methods: self-migrate and auto-migrate (in 30 days).

The description of “self-migrate now” is “Take control of when and how your listings migrate.”

The description of “auto-migrate” is “Let us handle the migration. We’ll manage it for you and keep you updated on progress.”

I know some of the domains in my Dan.com account are expired or I’ve sold them previously. So I chose “self-migrate” and clicked the confirmation box, thinking I’d have some control over which domains migrated.

I was wrong.

As soon as I clicked the confirmation button, Dan began the migration…for all domains not showing “already_listed”.

This means my Afternic account now has listings for domains I no longer own, including ones I previously sold through Afternic. I will have to spend time cleaning it up, and Afternic now has more stale listings than it used to.

Another thing I must figure out is a new home for my Google Registry domains, such as .app. Dan resolved each domain to its actual domain with an SSL certificate. GoDaddy landers forward the domain to a page on GoDaddy.com. Because they don’t have an SSL at the domain level, these domains won’t resolve to landers.