[ncc-services-wg] Decommissioning RIPE Networking App and RIPE Mailing List Forum

Dear all,

By the end of April, we will decommission the RIPE Networking App and 
also the RIPE Mailing List Forum. In short, these are two services that 
have not developed in the way we envisioned when we launched them and 
our research shows they are not widely used. We do not wish to devote 
development time and maintenance to them when instead we can allow our 
developers to focus on the services that bring most value to users. More 
details on the reasons for decommissioning these services are provided 
below.

RIPE Networking App

The RIPE Networking App was launched in 2017 and for the next five RIPE 
Meetings it was widely used by attendees to chat and meet each other 
virtually. However, this function was largely taken over by the Meetecho 
platform.

The initial reasoning for the RIPE NCC to build our own app rather than 
using an off-the-shelf product was for RIPE NCC Access integration. The 
app, as expected, had less usage during the online-only meetings, but 
our data shows there was no return to normal figures post-pandemic at 
RIPE 84 and RIPE 85, and even less so at other RIPE NCC-organised events 
where the app was used.

There are also a number of feature requests from attendees and event 
organisers that would require a complete rewrite of the app needing 
considerable specialist resources if we were to provide them:

- Multi-language support (important for regional events)
- Right-to-left (RTL) display
- Ability to send images
- Phone calendar integration
- Displaying both onsite and online attendance status

We believe that with the introduction of Meetecho, which has many of the 
same features of the Networking App, and a possible off-the-shelf 
solution that supports multi-language and RTL display for smaller RIPE 
NCC-organised events in Eurasia and the Middle East, we will be able to 
meet the demands that the Networking App was intended to meet.

The RIPE Mailing List Forum

Created in 2016, the idea of the forum was to extend the mailing list 
discussions with an additional interface.

However, shortly after implementing the forum, we noticed that spam was 
being sent to some of the mailing lists via the forum. This was because 
it was possible to subscribe to the mailing lists using a RIPE NCC 
Access account and there wasn't very much we could do to combat that. 
This resulted in us making the forum read-only, which contradicted the 
reason we created the forum in the first place.

We are currently busy with the migration of all RIPE community mailing 
lists from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3. Mailman 3 will allow better 
interaction with the mailing lists from a browser than the RIPE Forum 
does. Decommissioning this will also declutter our website which will 
help as we continue to redevelop and redesign www.ripe.net. And we will 
then avoid confusion with the recently-launched RIPE NCC Forum, which we 
hope you will join:
https://forum.ripe.net/

If you have questions or comments on the decommissioning plans, or you 
have ideas on how we can help with making connections at events or 
facilitating good online discussions, please let me know.

Kind regards,

Fergal Cunningham
Head of Membership Engagement
RIPE NCC