On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 03:21:20PM +0100, Rodney Tillotson wrote:
2.
Secondly, the query users do not really know what "changed:" attribute means. ... most users and automated tools pick anything that resembles an email address in the whois query result and send them abuse complaints.
The question here is about external presentation; who sees "changed:", what they are looking for when they see it, what they think it means and what they do with it.
The anti-spam WG is preparing a broad proposal, but one early thought is to provide different database views for the different classes of user. Casual users looking for contact information in the default output are an important class, probably not the most well-informed or patient, and it may be worth suppressing "changed:" in the view they get. This applies whatever decisions we make about the internal behaviour or the way LIRs will use the attribute.
That seems like a good idea. Many casual users of the RIPE database do not query it directly, rather through a small number of web-based gateways. Would it be worth asking the owners of those gateways to filter out the changed field now, to see what effect that has? Cheers, Steve