Dear Colleagues, As mentioned in the posting with the subject "Proposed changes for abuse", here is the proposal to change object ordering. As always, please have a look and discuss it here. -- Shane Kerr Software Manager RIPE NCC This is a proposal to display output differently, making recursive lookup results clearer. Currently, the software has a grouping algorithm that sorts objects by type. For example, if a query finds two INETNUM objects, such as: inetnum: 10.0.0.0 - 10.0.0.127 . . admin-c: PERSON1-RIPE tech-c: PERSON1-RIPE . . inetnum: 10.0.0.128 - 10.0.0.255 . . admin-c: PERSON1-RIPE tech-c: PERSON2-RIPE . . For a query, such as: $ whois 10.0.0.0 - 10.0.0.0.255 Here, the related PERSON/ROLE/ORGANISATION objects will also be returned, after being grouped into types, ending duplication. Therefore, the actual result will contain: inetnum: 10.0.0.0 - 10.0.0.127 inetnum: 10.0.0.128 - 10.0.0.255 person: PERSON1-RIPE person: PERSON2-RIPE This kind of output may be misleading. The user needs to find contact details by looking first at the "admin-c:" and "tech-c:" attributes, and then look them up in the PERSON/ROLE objects shown at the end of the list. This becomes time consuming as the number of objects returned increases. We will change the default output format. We will group objects by relevance. This change will give the following result for the same query: % Information related to '10.0.0.0 - 10.0.0.127' inetnum: 10.0.0.0 - 10.0.0.127 person: PERSON1-RIPE % Information related to '10.0.0.128 - 10.0.0.255' inetnum: 10.0.0.128 - 10.0.0.255 person: PERSON1-RIPE person: PERSON2-RIPE The changes explained in the section 'Hiding Attributes That Contain E-Mail Addresses' in the abuse proposal will apply to each grouping in turn. If only PERSON2-RIPE contains an "abuse-mailbox:" attribute, PERSON1-RIPE will not be filtered when it first occurs in the output, but it will be filtered upon its second occurrence. The 'traditional' output format of the whois server will still be possible, by using the '-G' option. Note: Another proposal could be to present the reordered output if the '-G' option is passed, otherwise to use the current ordering. This would leave the average user with the confusing output, and give the more advanced users the intuitive output. Making it an option would avoid potential problems with tools breaking, but some of the abuse changes will break tools so this may be a good time to change the default.