[ripe-list] RIPE Discussion Mailing List Moderation and Archives

Dear colleagues,

In light of recent events on this mailing list, I have put together some
thoughts on moderation and a proposed way forward. I will put this topic
on the agenda for the RIPE 85 Community Plenary.

Context

On 22 July, a highly offensive racist email was sent to the RIPE
Discussion List. This mail clearly violates the RIPE Code of Conduct.
After discussion with the RIPE NCC, we decided to enable moderation on
the list.

On 23 July, people who had responded to the offender, notably myself,
the RIPE NCC’s Chief Community Officer, and another RIPE community
member, were sent further offensive mails by this person and were
subjected to ‘subscription bombing’ attacks (many thousands of mailing
list subscription requests sent to our inboxes).

List Moderation

All mails sent to <ripe-list at ripe.net> have been held for moderation
since this incident. They are reviewed by either Niall O’Reilly or
myself (as the RIPE Chair Team) before they are allowed through to the list.

The RIPE community has always been open to everyone and it has a
demonstrated ability to self-govern. We therefore view our decision here
as quite a severe one. Nevertheless, we have received a lot of support
from community members for these actions. With that support in mind, we
propose that we continue with moderation of the list until at least RIPE 85.

The moderation queue will be reviewed at least once a day, and together
Niall and I will decide how to proceed. If one of us is unavailable, we
will coordinate with other community members to ensure that we always
have more than one person available to moderate the list.

I will also provide a transparency report to keep the community informed
of activities and decisions ‘behind the scenes’ (i.e. whether mails have
been held/rejected and how many).

So far, no mails have been rejected without us first contacting the
original sender. This helps to increase understanding of the process.
However, it will ultimately be the moderators who decide if a mail is
rejected or not.

Offensive or Illegal Mails

We will remove the mail from 22 July from the RIPE List archives. This
message has no content beyond its aim to cause offense. Modifying
archives is not something we do lightly. In this case, we believe it is
important to avoid the implication that this kind of language is
acceptable to us as a community, especially for anyone reading the
archives in the future.

Rather than simply removing the mail, I asked the RIPE NCC to move the
content of the URL in question and replace it with an explanation that
makes it clear that a message has been taken out and why. This would
also apply to another mail sent in response, as it quoted the offensive
mail.

We also understand that the offensive email is illegal under Dutch law.
Because the RIPE NCC maintains the public archives of our mailing lists,
it is regarded as a hosting provider and with this comes an obligation
to remove unlawful content from its public infrastructure.

Future Archives

Some community members have suggested that we set up an ‘unmoderated
archive’, which is similar to how the RIPE NCC Member Discussion List is
currently set up. I agree that this is a workable solution that supports
transparency. It means that the complete archives, including any
rejected mails, will be available under a different URL that is separate
from the regular RIPE List archives.

We propose not indexing these unmoderated archives so they do not appear
in search engines. We will also add a warning to this page so that
people are informed that they might find rude or offensive content in
the unmoderated archives.

We believe such an approach is important for transparency, while at the
same time avoiding receiving offensive emails that undermine the
important work of our community.

Kind regards,
Mirjam Kühne
RIPE Chair