The changes that people are discussing have little to do with "what is" and "what isn't" on topic for the NANOG mailing list. What it does have lots to do with is cooperating on examination of the moderation and testing the current long-standing techniques to determine if they need to be re-vamped to reflect sentiments of the community at large. To me, it's not a productive effort to micro-manage(or MERIT) the list via the FAQ. The FAQ is a traditional and historically acceptable method of answering questions that are bound to come up repeatedly as a primary result of new participants from any source. I am interested in discussing the possibilities of self-policing the list. An example would be when I suggested you earn some stripes. I said it. You ignored it. I opened my killfile. You land on it. That's much simpler. Writing complicated rules and creating a Politburo-like atmosphere is in no-ones interest. ObOp: Abuse desks are easily confused with SPAM since the context of abuse desk discussion is typically wrt ...SPAM. The earlier email was more general, IMHO. -M< -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 VeriSign, Inc. (w) 703-948-7018 Network Engineer IV Operations & Infrastructure hannigan@verisign.com
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Bill Nash Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 12:51 PM To: Steve Sobol Cc: Susan Harris; nanog@merit.edu; Betty Burke Subject: Proposed list charter/AUP change?
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:
Susan keeps on claiming spam is offtopic for Nanog, yet the AUP/Charter/FAQ don't mention spam other than telling us not to ask "I'm being spammed, how can I make it stop?"
If it's flat-out offtopic, no matter what, or if the majority of list members don't want to talk about it on the list, why hasn't the FAQ been updated? Or does Merit just want us to try to guess what is offtopic?
Spam represents a significant percentage of email traffic, and its delivery is increasingly via trojaned dsl/broadband devices. Even spam delivered from quasi-legitimate sources is usually an abuse of resources that some NSP/ISP is paying for. Discussion of functional spam control at the ISP level, I think, is absolutely on topic for a list of this scope. Please note, that I say 'functional'. Random complaints would obviously not fall into this category.
Examples would include: Working enterprise-scale spam filtering (Hourly mail volume measured in thousands) Discussion of edge/core SMTP filtering to curtail spam sources. Policy discussions for handling domestic and international spam sources. Implementation, or requests for implementation, of SPF and similiar controls. Inter-network cooperation for handling large scale issues.
I think this last is pretty much exactly what a list like this is for, be it spam, regional power outages, BGP shenanigans, or widespread squirrel detonations.
- billn