Hi Carol, Blasco, Piet et.al.!

We actually discussed this point a bit in a slightly different light. An important question is: should the forward type be up to the object maintainer, to the whois server providing the referral (in this case RIPE), or the whois client, or end user.

As proposed here, it is the whois server, but could be modified in the future to also be the whois client.

I think this touches on a line of discussion that we already began a while ago, but became forgotten later: What's the mechanism and who does maintain (e.g. supply, control, register) the necessary information?

The object maintainer can in fact always prevent automatic request forwarding by putting the referral information in a remarks field.

However, if such a mechanism should become popular, then it may be suitable that whois clients be developed that can parse the refer field and resend the request to the appropriate server. If we allow the object maintainer to determine this in the <forward-type> field, then it actually limits flexibility in the future.

When and if we decide to eventually implement that flexibility (and we already had some private exchange on this aspect), then my first reaction would be to move that to some sort of maintainer object!? Initially, given the small set of affected objects, this can probably be sorted out infomally, but as soon as we open the flood gates...

Or is my thinking twisted?

I don't think so, but mine might be :-) Wilfried.