Bob Braden wrote:
>
> *>
> *> The other thing that would be nice is a way of getting all of the
> *> authors current contact info in one place and up to date.
> *>
> *> -MM
> *>
>
> If you have a good idea on how to keep contact information
> up to date, the RFC Editor would like to know.
>
While perfection is unachievable (after all, eventually all contact
information will be out of date as the authors move on to a different
addressing space), I believe we can do somewhat better than today. There
used to be a handle system that assigned unique identifiers to people. A
separate database (call it "whois" or "LDAP" or whatever) then tracks
the current location. If you want to get fancy, have a ping mechanism
that sends email to each author periodically (once a year, say), as that
at least increases the chance of catching somebody as their old address
is still reachable.
(FWIW, I do something similar for conference paper management in EDAS,
where authors and reviewers get assigned a unique and random 32-bit
identifier. They keep the identifier even as their contact information
or even name changes.)
--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs
