--On Sunday, May 5, 2019 20:52 -0400 Eric Burger
<eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I am not convinced "Kumar Xplorer" is a human. 'He'
> sent an email to a long-dead IETF mail list, with an
> incoherent body text, sent to a ton of non-human email
> addresses, only a few that resolve to ietf.org, that looked
> scraped from the Internet.
Eric,
Having corresponded with him privately and taken a few other
off-list actions some months ago in attempts to get the issues
this PR-request is about (and some others) under control, my
confidence that he is a real person (and that he is a "he") is
_extremely_ high. Not as high as my confidence that you and
Adam are real and human (because I've never met anyone claiming
to be him face to face and shaken his hand, as I have with two
of you) but not more than one or two confidence-steps below that.
Even if I did not have that personal experience, he has
responded to some correspondence at a level of detail that
considerably exceeds what I know about the state of the art in
bots carrying on conversations with humans (it is, of courwe,
possible that the state of the art has advanced very
significantly since I was last paying attention).
He has also, multiple times, copied messages and responses to
messages to IETF lists when the original messages were
explicitly sent privately and has done so after being
asked/reminded to not do so. While not called out in Adam's
note, that behavior also constitutes unprofessional and
disruptive behavior on IETF lists.
As Adam's note pointed out, his behavior, or behavior of someone
claiming to be him, in correspondence or on lists not connected
to the IETF is irrelevant to a BCP 83 PR-action.
> Let's block the address and move on.
Responding to this and Mike's suggestion about a permanent ban,
I think it is important that, when the IETF takes any action
that could be interpreted as disciplinary or punitive, we adhere
strictly to our own procedures, especially procedures that were
designed around reforming or correcting behavior rather than as
punishment. That would apply in this case as well unless there
was much stronger evidence of bot (or other fake individual)
behavior than an analysis of the content and patterns of
messages would actually suggest and, obviously, no strong
evidence to the contrary. Now, if we apply a PR action for a
year and he requests reauthorization, that latter should clearly
be considered carefully rather than automatically granted and,
if it should be granted, any unprofessional (or otherwise
rule-violating) behavior after that time should be met with
little or zero tolerance. But that low level of tolerance would
clearly be consistent with our rules and procedures.
best,
john
