I couldn't be bothered waiting. I've some domains due for renewal at the end of the year and decided to beat the holiday rush and just move then all over to namecheap.com.
I started the process yesterday afternoon. Still haven't seen anything on the GoDaddy side indicating any pending transfers. I imagine this sort of delay will only be worse come the 29th.
Update: just got a slew of form mail from namecheap. Apparently every EPP/authorization key code I entered, taken from the list generated by GoDaddy, is wrong. Now I have to re-do every transfer.
It may be that I entered the domain and EPP info into the namechaep form with some spaces (foo.com, x$fo!ss) and the namecheap form code was too clueless to realize that no EPP code is going to start with a space.
I also discovered that I cannot automatically transfer azhackers.com, apparently because it triggers some "bad, evil, we don't like it" domain name filter.
I transfer domains regularly between registrars because the transfer costs tend to be cheaper than the renewal costs. I've noticed that the last character of EPP values tend to be minor punctuation ([,.] etc.), which is ignored whenever I double-click to copy & paste.
I'd be certain this is intentional since those characters are ALWAYS (20+ domains transferred over a period of months) at the end of the code, although I cannot fathom the purpose since at that point you've already paid for the transfer and aren't going to give up the money you just spent.
I've noticed that the last character of EPP values tend to be minor punctuation ([,.] etc.), which is ignored whenever I double-click to copy & paste.
I took the CSV exported from GoDaddy, striped it down to multiple lines of
domain, EPP
domain, EPP
domain, EPP
..
and pasted that in.
That failed.
When I removed the space between the comma and the first character of the EPP key, it worked (so far for the few I retried).
My guess is that the space confused the form parsing code. Or maybe it was just a glitch.
In any event, I've been now moving domains successfully, and in the morning I'll be re-trying the bulk of the remaining names.
BTW, in my initial retry attempt I noticed that some domains were being flagged as not transferable, something I didn't catch when i attempted to moe 30 names at once.
One name was "questionable", two others were too close to the expiration date. I got in touch with Namecheap support and they arranged to get these names transfered as well.
And once all the ducks were in a row I've been getting pretty quick turnaround times from both namecheap and GoDaddy.
If I recall correctly (and it has been awhile since I worked directly with the Verisign Registry), the codes are generated by the registry, not the registrar. Therefore the question should be WTF is the registry playing at. Since they have no incentive to keep you from transferring, I imagine that it's just a byproduct of the algorithm they use to generate those EPP codes.
I had this issue with indyhackers.org/.com. Start a live chat on Namecheap and a representative will get the domain transferred for you.
(I also ran into the EPP code issue with indyhackers.com, and a long delay with a few recent recent transfers. Ugh. I am under the impression the issues are on GoDaddy's end, but, regardless, I've never had issues with transferring to Namecheap in the past.)
Also interesting is that I had no idea that Maker Bench existed, even though it's practically within walking distance.
MakerBench seems to do a poor job of promoting itself. I think their RSS feed, for example, used to be filled with posts from assorted other sites (e.g. make.com) such that I gave up on it as being to noisey. It looks to be more focused now so I re-subbed
A few user groups meet there, too, such as the Android dev group.
My AZ Hackers group had been meeting up in Scottsdale but attendance faded to zero after a few months. I've thought about reviving it down at MakerBench but got distracted with work.
Anyways I'll have to write to namecheap about getting the name approved for transfer.
Well, it may have been a mistake on the calendar, actually, at least for that particular Tuesday. But I did meet several people working on different projects (unrelated to Arudrino) and it was interesting nonetheless.
The laser cutters they have are pretty interesting.
Another update: The soon-expiring domains that motivated me to get going on the transfer are apparently expiring too soon to allow the transfer.
Namecheap FAQ says that since a transfer might take up to eight days(!) they will not automatically process transfer requests for domains expiring within that time.
However, they say you can open a ticket to see if they will do a manual transfer that completes sooner.
So, I opened such a ticket, and also asked for help moving the suspiciously named azhackers.com domain.
In the meantime the resubmitted domains are now going through; I've told GoDaddy to approve the transfers (via the control panel).
Keeping two or three domains on GD wouldn't be the end of the world, but it means I would not be able to just completely walk away from them (whihc is what I really want).
I started the process yesterday afternoon. Still haven't seen anything on the GoDaddy side indicating any pending transfers. I imagine this sort of delay will only be worse come the 29th.
Update: just got a slew of form mail from namecheap. Apparently every EPP/authorization key code I entered, taken from the list generated by GoDaddy, is wrong. Now I have to re-do every transfer.