Re: [Tools-discuss] Datatracker login for errata

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, May 29, 2023 08:22 +0200 Carsten Bormann
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 28. May 2023, at 19:23, John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>>> I see that you now need to solve a captcha to submit errata,
>>> as well as type in your name and email. This seems like
>>> unnecessary friction.
>> 
>> We're still getting a lot of junk errata.
> 
> Let's face it: We'll have to moderate errata reports.
> (A human looks at them before they are sent on to a gazillion
> people who all have to discard them as garbage.)
> 
> The moderator will only discard garbage reports, but I think
> that is the specific problem we need to solve. The reports
> that are wrong, misguided, not understanding the purpose of
> errata, etc., still will be accepted, I think.
> 
> Can we do this and keep the threshold for submitting errata
> low otherwise? (And can we agree to work on reducing the
> incentive to create datatracker accounts that will then be
> used for other spam?)
> 
> Grüße, Carsten

Carsten,

That works for me, with two qualifications/suggestions:

(1) Moderation should occur before reports are circulated to
authors and ADs, not after.  Otherwise much of the damage is
done, especially if one of those recipients decides that, if the
erratum got that far, a response is in order and puts on
together.  If that is not possible for some reason, the
distributed copies of the errata reports should bear a clear
heading that says something like "this report has not yet been
through the moderation process; please wait NN days to see if
the moderator(s) reject it before working on a response".

(2) The moderators either need to have clear criteria for what
constitutes "garbage" or be trusted by the community.  While
that is probably not necessary for the obvious garbage cases (as
an example more extreme than I hope we are seeing, "RFC9999 is
in error because it does not promote my favorite sex toy for
which the references are...") a smart spammer/ attacker will be
able to fabricate messages that will require at least a modicum
of subject matter expertise to classify as garbage/ not garbage.
And there should probably be a mechanism to assure the IESG and
community that the filtering is being applied reasonably and
consistently.  That, again, probably implies more work for the
IESG.

  best, 
    john