Contact types

All contacts have to be created upfront. You will only need to enter the ‘ALIAS’ (=unique identifier) for this person in a transaction form. Every alias is unique over the whole system, i.e. they can’t be used by different registrars.

The set of characters allowed for contact data are iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15, excluding ‘' and ‘@’.

There are 4 types of contacts:

Billing

The billing contact is required when you want to register a domain name. It is the person/department to whom the invoices are sent. The language of the invoices is in the language of the billing contact’s choice. Exactly 1 billing contact can be created per registrar. The billing contact is the first contact you need to create when starting as a registrar. It is impossible to delete the billing contact, but it can be updated to a different person/department.

Technical or onsite

At least 1 technical contact must be associated to each domain name. This is the person to contact in case of a technical problem.

• You should choose the type ‘onsite’ when the technical contact is from the organisation of the registrant or from a third party (like an intermediate website builder). Maximum 5 contacts of type ‘onsite’ can be associated with a domain name.

• In case the registrant does not have any technical knowledge, then you should link a technical contact of your own organisation (the registrar) to the domain name. To define such a contact, you need to specify ‘tech’ as the type. Maximum 10 contacts of type ‘tech’ can be registered in total per registrar. Maximum 5 contacts of type ‘tech’ can be associated with a domain name.

Registrant

.be domain names can be registered by everyone. This means the registrant can be a private person or an organisation. It is very important this distinction is made, because it has a certain legal consequence. Furthermore, there is a restriction to updating registrants, because the identity has to remain the same.

In general, the registrant is responsible for the domain name. In case of a conflict this is the person/organisation who will be contacted. All address information and the e-mail address of the registrant should be correct and accurate and should belong to your client. If this contact cannot be reached the domain name can be revoked.

• Private person: The ‘Organisation’ field must be left empty. The ‘Name’ field should contain the ‘firstname lastname’ of the private person. Domain names registered for this registrant are personal domain names, therefore it is not possible to make major changes to the name of the registrant by means of an update!

• Organisation: The ‘Organisation’ field must be filled in with the correct company/organisation name. The ‘Name’ field is ignored, but it is advisable to fill in the name of the responsible person within the organisation. Feel free to use terms as ‘Department, ‘Director’, ‘Chairman’, etc. … Similar to personal domain names, it is not possible to make major changes to the organisation field by means of an update. It is possible to change the ‘name’ field, because responsible persons tend to change within certain organisations or companies.

Registrant verification

Whenever a new domain name is registered, it is subjected to Registrant verification. Each registrant can have one of three verification statusses:

• Not verified: The registrant has not been subjected to Registrant verification. When using this registrant in a new registration, it will be subjected to Registrant verification and possibly be selected for verification. If the registrant provides validating documentation, the contact can be set to Approved.

• Pending: The registrant has been checked and validating documentation is needed to approve he registrant. Any future registrations with this registrant won’t be delegated until validating documentation is provided. Only in this state any update to the contact is allowed.

• Approved: The registrant has provided validating documentation and has been approved. Any future registrations will be delegated immediately.

Do you want to make changes to the registrant contact?

• Some minor changes are allowed:

  • Changing uppercase to lowercase, or vice versa.

  • Changing the word order.

  • bvba to bv (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

  • cvba to cv (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

  • sprl to srl (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

  • scrl to sc (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

  • scs to SComm (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

  • sa to se (and variations with dots, in that direction only).

• If there is an error in the identity of the registrant, it could be resolved by using the monitored update transaction.

• If you want to change the identity of the registrant, you need to initiate a transfer transaction.

Note

Any update is allowed when a contact is in status verification pending.

Important

One contact person should have one alias! Don’t create aliases you don’t use/need!

Please don’t pollute the DNS Belgium database unnecessarily by creating several aliases for the same contact person. This will also make it harder for you to group domain names per customer. We also explicitly ask that you don’t create contact aliases that you don’t use. This is not only polluting our database but - if done in large or even excessive numbers - can have a negative impact on the database performance.

If DNS Belgium notices abusive behaviour by a registrar creating a lot of unnecessary contact aliases, it can decide to block that registrar’s account in order to protect the integrity of its database and the overall performance of the database.

Country codes

When creating a contact, you need to specify its country code. The codes used are specified in the ISO 3166-1 list with a few additional codes from the ISO 3166 reserved codes list.