On 10/15/23 14:10, Carsten Bormann wrote:
There were two responses, both from people who (17+ years later) I believe weren’t exactly enthused about the additional transparency this created.
Calling this "transparency" is about as accurate as calling a curvy funhouse mirror an accurate reflection of the person looking at it.
But most IETFers are probably capable of judging for themselves what value, positive and/or negative, these bot postings provide, and most IETFers are probably capable of filtering those postings. (In Thunderbird it takes about 5 minutes.) For that matter, most IETFers are probably capable of computing these statistics themselves without much difficulty, if they cared enough to do so.
I guess the other factor is that the current IETF list is very different than it was in 2006, and a consensus that held under 2006 conditions may no longer exist under current conditions.
In 2006, the IETF list was sort of a central discussion for the IETF community. That was long before IETF management decided to disrupt that sense of community in various ways, so that management would have a greater ability to resist community pushback on their actions. It was also before the "moderators" were directed to micro-police the IETF list in order to enforce arbitrary made-up posting criteria with no transparency, and also before moderators (as far as I knew) routinely tried to discourage participation by individuals who (for unknown and/or arbitrary reasons) management did not like. The IETF list, and IETF, are in my estimation much more hostile to community participation today than they ever were back then.
But different people have different ideas about what "hostility" and "inclusion" means, and some people will insist that the only way to make the list "inclusive" is for the list to be hostile to participation from people whom they don't like.
My current opinion is that the bot postings have long been inappropriate, arbitrarily discriminatory, harmful in some ways, generally in poor taste, and a longstanding low-level irritation that has endured for far longer than it was useful, if it was ever useful. But they're nowhere nearly as harmful as some other things that management supports these days. If I were trying to make the IETF list more useful, getting rid of the bot posts would not be the most important things on my list.
Keith
