Please be nice... (Was Re: Exodus?)

Pete Kruckenberg pete at kruckenberg.com
Mon Jan 4 23:50:16 UTC 1999


On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, David Diaz wrote:

> In the last 6 weeks I have noticed a major drop off in nanog postings.  
> I'm not complaining as we all know how many posts we go a day.  
> Recently I almost miss the number of posts :).  What I am a great deal
> concerned about is that a request numerous times to "watch what you
> post" as well as scoldings on the list have made people gunshy.

Amen. 

I've always found it interesting that there is such a huge difference
between the set of regular posters on a list and the set of people who
complain about inappropriate postings.

Compare the discussions on this list to any number of conversations that
happen at NANOG meetings. I don't ever recall someone getting up during a
presentation and asking the speaker not to mention irrelevant topics, and
I am pretty certain that it costs people a heck of a lot more to travel to
NANOG than they pay for email access.

This whole issue of relevance is, well, irrelevant. The fact of the matter
is, not every message is going to be relevant to every subscriber. I
believe this is the North American Network Operators' Group, not the "Big
5 Network Operators Group" or the "DS-3-or-higher Network Operators
Group", so there are going to inherently be different levels of relevance
to the various members of this mailing list.

I suspect that many discussions here probably aren't relevant to large
chunks of the group. I didn't hear any all-Bay or all-Ascend shops ask
that the recent discussion about Cisco config-checkers was irrelevant,
though it certainly wasn't very relevant to them. The complaints posted
regarding the Exodus outage were probably relevant to Exodus customers, as
well as to people who would be passing along information on outages to
Exodus services. The complaints seemed to imply that because it wasn't
relevant to everyone on the list, or to at least a lot of people, it
shouldn't have been posted.

I have to agree with Dave completely. I believe that it is way too extreme
to jump on a message just simply because it represents something that
could be a threat in the future. Yea, if everyone posted a message to
NANOG everytime a /32 went down, it would be a problem. But wouldn't it
also be a problem if everyone made their opinion known about any other
topic on this list? Maybe when that starts happening, there could be some
discussion about solving an /actual/ problem, not about preventing a
potential problem.

I, for one, would like to encourage that this forum be a place to discuss
anything that is even remotely related to network operations, whether it
be outages, management, whatever.

Pete.




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