Unable to Purchase Chinese Domain Names
🌐 Platform: https://www.didnames.io/app/?domain ⚙️ Severity: High 💡 Category: Domain Registration / Internationalization (i18n) / Input Handling
🧩 Description:
When attempting to purchase a Chinese domain name (e.g., 白人女士), the system fails to proceed with the purchase and displays an error message:
❗️**“Please enter a valid domain name”**
The site prevents users from continuing to checkout, making it impossible to register non-Latin character (Unicode) domains.
🪜 Steps to Reproduce:
- Go to https://www.didnames.io/app/?domain
- In the search bar, type a Chinese domain name, e.g. 白人女士
- Click Search
- Observe that the system displays: > ❗️**“Please enter a valid domain name”** >
- User cannot continue to the Buy or Register process.
✅ Expected Result:
- The platform should allow Chinese character domain names and proceed to the registration or purchase flow.
- It should convert or encode non-ASCII text using Punycode (IDN support) instead of blocking input.
❌ Actual Result:
- The search/purchase field rejects Chinese domain inputs.
- Displays the error: > ❗️**“Please enter a valid domain name”** >
- No way to buy or register domains in non-English scripts.
⚠️ Impact:
- Prevents registration of internationalized (IDN) domains.
- Excludes Chinese-speaking and other non-English users from using DIDNames.
- Reduces platform inclusivity and potential global user adoption.
🔍 Possible Cause (Hypothesis):
- Input validation only allows A–Z, 0–9, and hyphen (-) characters.
- Lack of Unicode / Punycode handling in frontend validation or backend domain parsing.
- Missing i18n support in domain validation logic.
🧰 Suggested Fix:
- Enable Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) support using Punycode encoding.
- Update input validation regex to accept Unicode characters.
- Allow frontend to convert Unicode domains to Punycode before API submission.
- Display user-friendly feedback for unsupported scripts.