If you’ve never encountered the following screen, consider yourself lucky.
I hate it. I hate it so much.
No normal human understands how DNS works. Or wants to. Or needs to. But that means that freaks like me have to understand how it works, because we take care of all of this nonsense for them.
Enshittification is everywhere in 2026, of course, but I don’t think it’s so acutely, painfully present as it is in having to log into someone else’s domain registrar account.
Domain names are pretty sensitive. It makes sense that the tools for managing them need robust security. But they also need to be accessible not just to the non-technical owner of the domain, but the geek that owner is paying to do the geeky stuff for them.
Most good registrars (ha! there are no good registrars, just less-bad ones) have set up mechanisms for domain owners to grant access to technical users. Network Solutions was late to that party, and even though they do finally offer it, their underlying, archaic systems are so fucked up and incompatible with each other that the process is still fundamentally broken.
This morning I needed to get into this client’s Network Solutions account. Of course, the email address associated with their account — the one that gets the initial 2FA verification code — is long-since out of use. (Yeah, this is going to open up a whole new world of pain for them at some point in the future, but I’m not dealing with it today.) Fortunately they do have their cell phone associated with the account, so I was able to have the code texted to them instead.
Then it’s a race against the clock. Are they checking their texts? Will they respond within the tight 10-minute window before the code expires? Of course not, so I waste a half hour trying new codes and hoping I can get in touch with them.
Finally, I’m in. And the first thing I do is go to the team settings and add myself as a user on the account.
When the confirmation email comes in, with a verification link for me to click, I hastily click it, forgetting that it’s going to open in the same browser I am already using, kicking me out of the existing Network Solutions session I have open with the client’s user ID in the process.
No big deal. Now that I’m in with my own account, I can just use it instead. Only… the client has two different domain names, and for some reason the account I’ve been granted access to only sees one of them. And of course, it’s not the domain I need to edit.
Back to trying to log into the client’s account so I can try to sort out my own access. Now, in the past, Network Solutions did not require re-entering a 2FA code if you logged back into the same account within 24 hours. Of course that has been changed.
And, at this moment, I am in another half-hour-plus cycle of requesting a code, hoping the client will reply, and… oh wait. Shit.
THIS IS HELL!
P.S. I already complained about this five years ago and if anything it has only gotten worse since then. How could it get worse???