Colleagues

The new co-chairs have prioritized existing and proposed NWIs. Our intent is to reach consensus on open items. We accept that we can't tackle them all at once and we may not address them in numerical order. We would like to start with one that has been discussed for many years, without coming to an acceptable solution, the implementation of the "abuse-c:" attribute.

We thoroughly reviewed the working group discussion on the “abuse-c:” attribute, including reviewing Tim's initial draft of a problem statement. We removed the examples to make the problem statement brief and to the point. Anyone concerned with "abuse-c:" has most likely encountered one of these problems and doesn't need quoted examples. We also removed comments on the 'good parts' of the current implementation. That can come back when we discuss pros and cons of possible solutions. Then added in the issue Tobias made about the cleanup.

So we end up with the problem statement shown below. Can we agree these are the problems that cause issues with some users? Are there any other problems that anyone has encountered?

cheers
Denis
co-chair DB-WG

Problem statement on "abuse-c:" implementation:
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It is currently not possible to specify alternative abuse contacts for different resources in the RIPE Database held by different parts of the same organisation.

It is currently not reasonably possible to specify alternative abuse contacts for resources in the RIPE Database assigned to organisations other than the parent organisation. In many circumstances these organisations are customers of the parent organisation. The lower organisation wishes to handle the abuse separate from the parent organisation.

After the introduction of "abuse-c", the "abuse-mailbox:" attribute in the PERSON, MNTNER, ORGANISATION and IRT objects was intended to be deprecated. This cleanup was never done and the old data causes confusion to users manually searching the database.