So, What Now, NANOG? Was: Request response [important]

Daniel Golding dgolding at burtongroup.com
Thu Mar 18 16:11:14 UTC 2004


On 3/17/04 9:51 PM, "Brian Bruns" <bruns at 2mbit.com> wrote:

> 
> Erm, something is definately up tonight.  Message is below, for those of you
> who didn't want to touch this message.
> 
> I can't get to the site listed in the message, so I have no idea what its
> trying to deliver exactly.
> 
> Anyone care to comment?

Ok, so what's the answer to this?

We can sit around all day analyzing these emails. It doesn't matter where
they came from or who compromised which hosts - at this point, that's
immaterial. At some point in the Internet's development, we could have had
the FBI kick down the door of this guy and cart him away, and NANOG is safe
once again. Not anymore - even if this guy is "reachable", there will be
five others tomorrow, and ten others next week. I'm sure this is all over
IRC by now. 

These issues, combined with the ever worsening S:N ratio on this list are
destroying it. Some of the folks who have long been mainstays of the NANOG
community don't even read it anymore.

Its time to figure out what to do about this, employing a proactive stance.
The answer is not "start a new mailing list". Names have power, as they say,
and NANOG has the juice. So, a few simple proposals for people to chew
over...

1) Turn on list moderation and recruit a corp of volunteer moderators. The
FAQ volunteers did a good job, BTW. Dave Farber's IP list (not Internet
Protocol, its Interesting People), is a good example of a low volume
moderated list.

2) Convert this list into a blog or discussion forum with some sort of
moderation. Yes, the idea of SlashNog is disturbing, but email is a pretty
weak medium at this point in time, for multipoint communications of an
important nature. We have stuff like RSS that may be better suited.

3) Figure out a better way to "gatekeep" nanog-post, to keep the number of
permitted posters down and to confirm their identities.

4) Shut it down. Will the last engineer on NANOG-L kill the lights?

This forum is not of any use if any significant percentage of the posters
are teenage IRC-lurking hackers or spammers. We need to "do the Darwin" -
change or die.

This isn't a mindless screed (although I do feel much better now :). Those
who are experts in this area should post their ideas about how to
save/reform/transform nanog-l. I'm sure Susan will be very receptive - it
can't be nice to have some bozo's forging your email and sending out virus
infected mail to THOUSANDS of your colleagues.

If folks fear attack or retribution, please forward your comments to me and
I'll anonimyze them before posting.

Thanks!

-- 
Daniel Golding
Network and Telecommunications Strategies
Burton Group





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