On May 23, Andre Koopal <andre.koopal@nld.mci.com> wrote:
I think that returning by default only the top level object would be a bad idea. Contact information are already hidden by the abuse-mailbox attribute in the IRT record, so this would not make things simpler for users looking for an abuse desk contact and would be annoying for everybody else. It doesn't return the top-level object, it returns the most specific inetnum together with the irt object specified in the most specific inetnum with an irt object. To be honest exactly what you expect. Yes, this is what I meant, and I do not think that it is what people expect when doing a whois query.
If you really want to help users to quickly find a good contact then please add in a prominent place on www.ripe.net a form like http://www.cert.pl/cgi-bin/ipdig.pl, which automatically looks for a the best possible abuse contact and presents only that. This is trivial to implement and would serve the needs of most of the whois web interface users. I am not against it, but getting users to use something else will not solve the problem. We always need 'whois -h whois.ripe.net ip-number' returns the wanted information. Reality check: most of the people who need this do not even know what a command line is.
-- ciao, Marco