[anti-abuse-wg] 2010-08 New Policy Proposal (Abuse contact information)

On 8 nov 2010, at 16:14, Emilio Madaio wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> A new RIPE Policy Proposal has been made and is now available for
> discussion.
> 
> 
> You can find the full proposal at:
> 
>    http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2010-08.html
> 
> We encourage you to review this proposal and send your comments to
> <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net> before 6 December 2010.


Regarding this proposal, people might want to have a look at the archives from 2004. I know times have changed, so it may all not be relevant anymore. But during the discussion around the introduction of abuse-c and where it should be placed a lot of comments were made, some of which might possibly still hold true today.

The original idea behind abuse-c was to create a fixed format attribute instead of people using the remarks field, which was and is common practice for a lot maintainers. The main purpose for this, was to stop people using a simple grep '@' command to find contact points and thus spamming each and every contact returned, including the changed lines. At the same time it was decided to no longer show the changed attributes by default, again to guide people into the right direction on which contact to use.

Minutes/presentations on this subject can be found at:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/db/minutes/ripe-47.html
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-47/presentations/ripe47-db-abusec.pdf
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/db/minutes/ripe-48.html
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/db/minutes/ripe-49.html

And the relevant mailing lists (primarly db-wg, some anti-spam) for this period.

I think again with this proposal the main issue is not forcing people to create and reference an IRT object. Although during the 2004 discussion some strong arguments were made against it. The big challenge is to make sure the database users actually starting to take notice and using the IRT as a contact point. This means educating them and providing easy and clear documentation on how to use the RIPE database. This is somewhat easy for the resource holders, but much harder for the community who is querying the database.

Now this documentation could point to IRT, it could also simply still point to abuse-c. It is not as much as what the message contains, it's about getting it across in the first place.

My personal view is this won't solve the main issue. Making IRT mandatory does not improve data quality especially not in the long run. People might just put something in to make things work or they will simply forget to update the object once it's there.
I realize there is another proposal floating around to fix this by introducing a regular check. But as these are seperate there is no guarantee both will make it to implementation. And again making it mandatory for people putting stuff in the database, by no means mean people pulling data from the database will start using it. At least not unless you tell them how.

MarcoH
(no hats other than concerned citizen)