AUP for NANOG?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Do we have an Acceptable Usage Policy fot this NANOG mailing list?

Of late this forum has become a forum for ad hominem rather than a
friendly discussion of technical issues. While I may disagree with
the opinions of others, I wouldn't resort to name calling or belittling.

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."

If you're so smart, feel free to share your knowledge. It's unnecessary
to belittle someone for asking a question or stating an opinion. The
motivation behind this post is to serve as a reminder of the purpose of
the NANOG forum. Let's return some decorum here.

matthew black
california state university, long beach

2

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."

this remids me of the rest of our culture, whether it be nanog,
riding the bus, or walking down the street. no surprise as they're
all full of us funny monkeys, eh?

randy

3

Do we have an Acceptable Usage Policy fot this NANOG mailing list?

http://nanog.org/aup.html

I suspect that the question above is rather rhetorical, nevertheless.

Of late this forum has become a forum for ad hominem rather than a
friendly discussion of technical issues.

I agree. IMHO, I don't place much credibility in what I learn via this list. I wish I could.

4

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

5

Do we have an Acceptable Usage Policy fot this NANOG mailing list?

Of late this forum has become a forum for ad hominem rather than a
friendly discussion of technical issues. While I may disagree with
the opinions of others, I wouldn't resort to name calling or belittling.

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."

If you're so smart, feel free to share your knowledge. It's unnecessary
to belittle someone for asking a question or stating an opinion. The
motivation behind this post is to serve as a reminder of the purpose of
the NANOG forum. Let's return some decorum here.

Thanks for the comments, Matthew, and we do indeed have an AUP:

  http://www.nanog.org/aup.html

In the past the AUP was enforced too harshly (by me), and we've addressed
that problem by forming a new group of list-admins. Martin Hannigan is
our chair, and the other members are Chris Malayter, Steve Gibbard,
Sue Joiner (who has the joy of being the list-owner at Merit), and moi.
There's more info about us here:

  http://www.nanog.org/listadmins.html

We're still getting our act together about which "rules" to enforce, how
to coordinate group decisions about enforcement, etc. Lately we've been
sending individual messages about OT threads, personal slams, etc., in an
effort to get the list back on track. Stay tuned.

6

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
... :slight_smile:

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

randy

7

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:

8

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.

9

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

10

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.

Most of what gets strongly objected to falls into the categories of either petty arguments, stuff that has nothing to do with network operations, or the extreme hostility that seems to be consistently generated by a few topics.

If people consistently asked three questions before they posted, "is it polite?", "does it have to do with network operations?", and "will this be interesting to some portion of the NANOG readership?", I think we'd be in fine shape.

-Steve

11

: I am new to this field and I joined here to learn more.
:
: 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.
:

: > 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

I'd just like to say a short thing for folks new to the list and are
considering posting. You need to do several things first. Search,
search, search. Look in the Merit FAQs. If you can't find the answer,
thicken up your skin and put on a pair of flameproof panties, so you don't
get your feelings hurt. Then, just before you hit send ask yourself the
three questions that Steve Gibbard suggested. I know myself and other
longtime posters are guilty of violating these, but it's a goal to reach
for nonetheless...

scott

12

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

13

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. :slight_smile:

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