[ncc-services-wg] Members-discuss complaints

Hi all,

The amount of people complaining on the members-discuss list that they never signed up for it makes me wonder how they ended up here. You'd expect that if an organisation became a RIPE NCC member and provided an email address to add to the members-discuss list that the person using that address would know about it. But I get the feeling that most of the people complaining have no idea what the RIPE NCC is, so why would someone at their company sign them up for the members-discuss list?!?

From what I can see in the LIR portal there is no confirmation of the email address when adding someone to the list. Just log in to the LIR portal, add an address and "Members discussion subscription added successfully". Could it be that some malignant LIRs are adding random addresses to the list? You'd hope that all LIRs behave responsibly, but I guess that might be too optimistic.

In any case, I'd like the RIPE NCC to check the email addresses of those who complain that they never wanted to be on this list. Check which LIR added them, when they were added, whether there seems to be some relationship between the LIR and the email address etc. Either those people should have a discussion inside their own organisation on signing up unwitting colleagues to mailing lists, or there are actually malignant LIRs that the RIPE NCC seriously needs to talk to. See what we can learn from this. I do hope that Hanlon's razor still applies :)

In either case: may I suggest the NCC implements a confirm system where people are only added to the members-discuss list after confirming that they actually want to be on it? The current implementation of trusting that what is entered in the LIR portal interface is with consent of the user of the email address apparently is too surprising for some of the users (and yes, I do realise that the number of intentional users is much higher than the number of complainers, but lets try to minimise the latter category)

Cheers!
Sander

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