--On Saturday, 14 October, 2023 16:20 -0700 Rob Sayre <sayrer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 4:13 PM Ole Jacobsen > <olejacobsen@xxxxxx> wrote: > >> Rob, >> >> I don't know how long you've been subscribed to the IETF main >> discussion list, >> but the weekly summary statistics have been around for at >> least a decade if not more. >> > > I've read the list for 18 years. Is that enough? Yes. And six weeks would be enough too. Except that my understanding of Ole's point is that, to the extent to which you just noticed and started complaining, that is, itself, unusual. Not improper, just unusual. What, IMO, is important about how long a variation on the current weekly statistical postings has been around is that, when Thomas started it, there was a community discussion of whether it was appropriate and helpful. The consensus, IIR, was that some people found it helpful and others were not going to be significantly bothered by one relatively short posting a week. There is a separate issue about what sorts of things can be done because there are no or few strong objections and at least tacit approval by the IESG and what things require drafts, IETF Last Calls, RFC publication, etc. I will have more to say about that in other contexts but, for this case, I believe (as I said earlier) that there was community agreement, long ago, to these statistical traffic postings. By contract, my recollection is that, when the IETF and Last Call lists were split, there were objections to a similar report for the latter and it disappeared. > I don't like the bot, because I think it is used to shut > people up, and it is clearly against the list charter. But, if > the IETF does run its usual process and get consensus, that's > how it should be. Use your own process! See above for the needed approval process for these things. However and IMO more important: * AFAICT, very little of this has to do with whether the postings are being produced by a bot. If John were to run the same process to produce the statistics, then produce a summary of his opinion about what the statistics meant in context, then post the summary and statistics in a single message once a week, that would not constitute a posting by a bot. It would result in a longer message and those who object to the statistics themselves or to John and/or his interpretations would still have the choice of reading the messages, deleting them each week, reading some of them and deleting others without reading, or filtering them out entirely. I do assume they would generate even more list traffic as people disputed various conclusions in the summary, but it still would not be about a bot. * On the other hand, if you object to automated postings without I-Ds specifying them, I see many such messages either here or on ietf-announce (or posted to both) for which there was on such process. Why are you not objecting to this and not to those? If you are merely objecting to the content of these and/or the opinion of John Levine and some others that the postings are interesting and/or useful, then that is not about bots but about your opinion of the content. If content is the real issue, you should probably know that I'm not a big fan of that weekly posting. I wasn't a big fan when Thomas was posting it. I'm slightly less of a fan now, not because of anything that is different substantively but because the change in practices toward more use of other lists rather than continuing discussions on ietf@xxxxxxxx has made it, in my personal opinion, much less informative. I also think it has always failed to capture a pair of important nuances, which are (i) the summary itself is rather crude because it fails to capture the difference between new material and messages that are part of long threads in which little trimming of prior material (whether in-line or top-posting) has been done and (ii) AFAICT, there is no community consensus as to whether the IETF prefers lots of short postings or a smaller number of shorter and more analytic/comprehensive ones. FWIW, any decision about that preference would probably drive some helpful contributors away. * If the problem is actually not the bot but "used to shut people up", I'd like to understand why you believe that. As a personal example, certainly there have been weeks that I'm at the top of the list. Certainly I've gotten off-list notes over the years, some quite abusive, telling me my messages are too long, that I should post less, and even that I'm an old fossil (or worse) who should drop out of the IETF. Almost none of those have cited these weekly postings as an authority. I have not heard from the SAA team or amyone else either official or public on that subject. Almost all of the offlist notes, if made public, would constitute violations of the Code of Conduct but, having complaints about far worse (in terms of effects on the standards process) postponed until "later" and then never taken up again, I consider myself to have been "shut up" over Code of Conduct complaints. There have been weeks in which I consider multiple, repetitive, postings from a small number of people -- postings that often put them at the top of the list -- to border on abusive. I get frustrated enough to delete many of their messages without reading them (just as I have been told that many people don't read most of mine). But the posting of their statistics does not seem to shut them up either. If you see those postings as instrumental in shutting people up, can we please have a conversation about the "shutting up" issue (which I would consider very serious) rather than one relatively small message a week? In that regard, I think Keith Moore's posting a few minutes ago (with Subject "principal effect of the bot postings") to be exactly on-point wrt the content question... but it also has almost nothing to do with bot versus not-bot. best, john p.s. not ignoring your other questions... another message coming.
