I'm at a bit of a loss trying to understand how bashing other lists constitutes an improvement on bashing other members of the NANOG list. I think the point of Matthew's email was that no one really cares for the bash fests, regardless of who it targets, be it on list, or off list. Personally, having joined NANOG a couple of months ago, I've been much more taken aback by the amount of off topic griping about each other or about whoever decides whatever somewhere, than I have been impressed by the amount of useful information to be gleaned from people's posts. I hadn't ever really planned on joining the post list to be able to send something to the list. I'm a little disappointed that my first urge to post has come from being tired of off-topic rants more than wanting to contribute something useful to the list. Romain Komorn Web Hosting Made Easy http://www.Globat.com/ Randy Bush wrote:

...

...

This reminds me of the way others behaved when I entered the field some 25 years ago. Some people were very helpful and friendly. Others responded very arrogantly with the tone of "how stupid you are for asking that question."

I didn't know you read misc@openbsd.org or questions@freebsd.org ... :)

you wanna see bad second grade playground behavior, try the asterisk mailing list.

randy

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Scott Grayban wrote:

I am new to this field and I joined here to learn more. I certainly have heard my share of bashing from linux forums.

The more bashing I hear here the less I want to ask a question here. I'm not stupid but I am worried that one question might spark a rash of flames back at me.

This is a newbies point of view.

I can't say this was wholly unexpected, with the major change in moderation the list has undergone. On a much smaller scale, I think some of what we're seeing is the same behavior you'd see in any chunk of populace that had been languishing under strict rule for a long period, to suddenly find it lifted. A new moderation team is in place, but hasn't quite gotten to the point where consistent, effective moderation is a palpable force within the list. In the interim, there's riots and looting and all manner of untoward behavior as people stretch their legs and find the edges of the new structure. Having been moderated myself in this past week, I'm glad to see that people have one, gotten past any trepidation of posting, and two, that the new moderation crew is getting up to speed. The newbie perspective does bring up a couple points that have been made in past arguments, in that there are a lot of nanog readers who aren't major backbone engineers, crusty wizened protocol authors, grand poobah service providers, or ex-MIT building hackers. Some readers are tackling problems on a day to day basis that are old hat for the seasoned NANOG denizens, and are bereft of the major benefit nanog provides (conversation with peers) because some of those problems have been argued to death and are now taboo. In most cases, the simple answer is to read the faq[1] or search the archives. For relatively newer folks though, sheer lack of experience will often cough up the caveat of not knowing what to look for. At the risk of triggering either a stupid argument or a landslide into bureaucracy, might I suggest the formation of nanog-isp as a narrower forum for non-backbone providers tackling operational and design issues specific to edge networks? Having learned (and missed) fundamentals by working completely on my own with various projects, I can safely say there's no substitute for active peer review and conversation. Either list itself is nothing without participants. Many complaints about the main list itself have to do with off-topic pursuits, fear of posting, or the inability to ignore a thread that's of no interest. I do think there's a large audience to nanog that would benefit from a more active forum dedicated to their specific issues. It's just an idea, and I could, of course, be completely wrong. - billn [1] http://www.nanog.org/listfaq.html#questions

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 12:20:14PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:

Speaking just for myself, I'd welcome discussion of operational and design issues specific to edge networks here, and newbie questions are useful as well. If those with experience don't share knowledge with those with less experience, we'll just have the same mistakes being made over and over again.

And, in that vein, I'd like to repost, to the list, a query which I sent offlist to a couple dozen people last week, and only got 3 replies: == The Background == It came up on NANOG a week or so ago, not for the first time, that it might contribute to the general well being of the net if the (hopefully) not insubstantial section of the network operations audience who *want* to run their networks better, but don't know *how* yet had some place to go to gather that information. Having acquired some experience in the last 6 to 9 months about the usefulness of wiki software (and particularly MediaWiki, which is used to run the half-million article Wikipedia and is fairly well tuned for large audiences and easy administration) for facilitating distributed knowledge capture, I suggested that it might be A Good Idea to set up a wiki site for this purpose. As it happens, the Wikipedia people themselves have a facility for this sort of thing. It was named Wikicities, because when Jimmy Wales thought up the idea, Geocities was pretty popular. He has since changed his opinion, but, of course, it's hard to rename such a site. == The Pitch == Since they have a finite investment in labor to set up and in network costs to run such sites, and also an investment in the brand name, they want to have a pretty good idea that people proposing such a site have a sufficiently large crew of writers, editors, and wranglers to make a given site viable before they'll approve it. At Michael Dillon's suggestion, I've sifted through the last 5 months or so of NANOG traffic, and picked out the addresses of those of you whom I either know (mostly from the list, admittedly), or whose chops seem obvious from the traffic on the list. [ and only three replied :-} ] All I need at this point, as tacky as it sounds, is your names. :-) If you think you'd be willing to contribute in some fashion to such a site, either by way of original writing, editing or commenting on other people's work, or by contributing original writing you've already composed, please let me know. In not more than a week, I'll count up the noses, and get in touch with the Wikicities people. == The Reminder == As with all good sources of knowledge, wikis provide metadata on the provenance of the information contained on them, and visitors are expected to make use of it when deciding how -- and how much -- to make use of the information they find there. Wikipedia has developed a fairly good set of procedures for coping with the situation wherein the information on a page is disputed or controversial, and the other situations experienced on a public wiki (I propose, if they'll let me, to make the wiki registered-user write only), but those situations *will* happen -- just making sure everyone has their expectations strapped on straight. If people want to contribute finished papers, those can be protected so that their form does not change, but in general, the information on the site will be subject to continuous editing and improvement -- with all changes attributed, of course. If you'd like to help out on this, or make suggestions, or if you think I'm completely off my rocker, please drop me a note back. And note that I'm not making this a NANOG project per se; I expect that the email, anti-spam, RBL, and other crowds will have useful things to contribute as well; I merely don't follow those crowds as closely. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me

On Apr 14, 9:22am, Scott Grayban <scott@fctenterprises.com> wrote:

The more bashing I hear here the less I want to ask a question here. I'm not stupid but I am worried that one question might spark a rash of flames back at me.

This is a newbies point of view.

Thanks for braving it.-) It would be interesting if we knew the newbie:bully:oldie ratio on NANOG. As an oldie, I would rather see "clueless" newbie questions as opposed to contentless rants and posturing, and I don't believe any kind of "edge" vs "core" split of NANOG is good. Networking is end-to-end, and what is needed is a "tech" vs "non-tech" split. In the old days we had a list called com-priv which effectively worked as the non-tech counterpart; anything to do with domain names, law suits, business practices, peering politics, legislation and regulation, etc, etc, etc would go on com-priv. Many, if not most, people subscribed to both lists, but kept things separate in their heads and in their postings. That didn't mean NANOG was a panacea for newbies, but just getting today's S/N ratio under control would be of great help. -- Per