Dear all, By the end of April, we will decommission the RIPE Networking App and also the RIPE Mailing List Forum. In short, these are two services that have not developed in the way we envisioned when we launched them and our research shows they are not widely used. We do not wish to devote development time and maintenance to them when instead we can allow our developers to focus on the services that bring most value to users. More details on the reasons for decommissioning these services are provided below. RIPE Networking App The RIPE Networking App was launched in 2017 and for the next five RIPE Meetings it was widely used by attendees to chat and meet each other virtually. However, this function was largely taken over by the Meetecho platform. The initial reasoning for the RIPE NCC to build our own app rather than using an off-the-shelf product was for RIPE NCC Access integration. The app, as expected, had less usage during the online-only meetings, but our data shows there was no return to normal figures post-pandemic at RIPE 84 and RIPE 85, and even less so at other RIPE NCC-organised events where the app was used. There are also a number of feature requests from attendees and event organisers that would require a complete rewrite of the app needing considerable specialist resources if we were to provide them: - Multi-language support (important for regional events) - Right-to-left (RTL) display - Ability to send images - Phone calendar integration - Displaying both onsite and online attendance status We believe that with the introduction of Meetecho, which has many of the same features of the Networking App, and a possible off-the-shelf solution that supports multi-language and RTL display for smaller RIPE NCC-organised events in Eurasia and the Middle East, we will be able to meet the demands that the Networking App was intended to meet. The RIPE Mailing List Forum Created in 2016, the idea of the forum was to extend the mailing list discussions with an additional interface. However, shortly after implementing the forum, we noticed that spam was being sent to some of the mailing lists via the forum. This was because it was possible to subscribe to the mailing lists using a RIPE NCC Access account and there wasn't very much we could do to combat that. This resulted in us making the forum read-only, which contradicted the reason we created the forum in the first place. We are currently busy with the migration of all RIPE community mailing lists from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3. Mailman 3 will allow better interaction with the mailing lists from a browser than the RIPE Forum does. Decommissioning this will also declutter our website which will help as we continue to redevelop and redesign www.ripe.net. And we will then avoid confusion with the recently-launched RIPE NCC Forum, which we hope you will join: https://forum.ripe.net/ If you have questions or comments on the decommissioning plans, or you have ideas on how we can help with making connections at events or facilitating good online discussions, please let me know. Kind regards, Fergal Cunningham Head of Membership Engagement RIPE NCC