How our team at Vercel used AI-based logic to improve our domain registry experience for international domains. Recently, there was an issue affecting our customers when trying to purchase a domain containing non-English characters. This problem became apparent when these domain purchases consistently failed, creating a significant roadblock for users wanting to expand their online presence with internationalized domain names (IDNs). Link to heading The bug background The root of the problem was the encoding process. Domains with non-English characters are encoded in Punycode format. This encoding allows for a wide range of international characters to be represented using the limited character set of the ASCII standard. However, when we sent these encoded domains to our domain registrar, OpenSRS, we encountered cryptic error messages that gave little indication of the underlying issue.…