WHMCS and Nominet EPP farce (again!)
On the 14th of January 2016 Nominet notified EPP users that they would be upgrading their EPP system to require TLS version 1.1 or higher connections on the 8th of June 2016 in order to keep the EPP system secure.
From the 2nd of February 2016 the Nominet EPP testbed was updated to reflect these new requirements so that registrars and software developers could test that their systems will work once this change has been made to the production EPP platform.
In the past, WHMCS have ignored notices from Nominet and waited until after such changes were put live before making the appropriate changes to their software, so I raised a ticket with WHMCS on the 19th of February 2016 in order to check that WHMCS were aware of the planned change and would be making the appropriate changes.
As usual, WHMCS completely dismissed this ticket and point blank refused to investigate any potential impact which could affect their customers.
In this case, the original date of the 8th of June was pushed back to the 22nd of June before being rescheduled to the 16th of August in order to give registrars more time to update and test their systems against the EPP testbed.
However, despite having over 7 months notice from Nominet and 6 months notice from at least one customer, WHMCS made no effort to test their EPP implementation against the Nominet testbed until after Nominet had made the changes and WHMCS customers complained of problems.
The WHMCS module was updated 4 days *AFTER* the change, which fell on a weekend and so some customers may not have had the technical resource immediately on-hand to test and deploy the update.
To top it all off, both publicly and in tickets WHMCS arrogantly tried to blame Nominet for their usual dismal failings.
I tried to comment on the WHMCS blog (http://blog.whmcs.com/?t=117270) and initially this comment was published, but despite WHMCS replying to it the comment was moderated and my follow up response was deleted (as was another reply asking why they deleted the previous reply!). Three weeks later, the comment is still moderated…
It speaks volume about the way WHMCS is run that they not only created the initial problem by arrogantly refusing to make the effort to test their module, but then tried to lay the blame on Nominet as well as actively surprising any negative comments criticising them for the way that they treat their customers with such contempt.