It is possible for registrars to set options in our Online Service to make some limited customisation of how the Automaton works.

Handshake options

This determines how domain names are accepted on to the registrar's tag. There are four settings:

Option	Description
Always accept registrar changes to your tag	All requests for a registrar change to the tag are automatically accepted.
Only handshake if new customer, otherwise accept registrar changes to your tag	Requests for a registrar change on to an existing account on the tag (i.e. an account number is given as part of the tag change) are accepted automatically, all other requests result in a handshake.
Always handshake	All requests for a registrar change to the tag result in a handshake.
Always reject registrar changes to your tag	All requests for a registrar change to the tag are rejected.

If a handshake is required when a registrar change is requested, an email is sent to the notification address for the registrar. This request contains the text required to accept or reject the request. The registrar needs to strip out the appropriate text, PGP sign it and send the result to the automaton. Registrar change requests not authorised within 5 days are automatically rejected. The default setting is Always accept.

Nameserver consolidation options

This option determines how we store nameserver data. There are two settings:

Option	Description
Consolidate nameservers	Whenever a nameserver is referred to by name, our systems will look in the database to find an object that matches the name (and glue records if provided) and use this before creating a new object. The advantage of this setting is nameserver data replication will be avoided. It will be possible to modify a nameserver object and all domain names referring to it will be modified.
Don't consolidate nameservers	Whenever a nameserver is referred to by name, such as when creating a domain name or when there is a registrar change to the tag, a new nameserver object will be created in the database.  Unless you refer to nameserver objects by identifier, new objects will always be created.  This will result resulting in a one domain - one (or more) nameserver object system.

Automaton field options

To reflect the changes in the June 2007 data structure, we have updated the automaton field names. To help preserve backwards compatibility, you can set this option to have the old field names returned in automaton list and query responses. The settings for this field are:

Option	Description
Maintain backwards compatibility	The Automaton will use the old field names in responses.
Use new field set	The Automaton will use the new field names in responses.

Incoming requests will accept both the old and new field name sets.