On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Bob George wrote: > Sorry, just trying to be a bit ironic. But if I'm providing a service > for free, decide to discontinue it, make all the right announcements > that it's closing, then STILL keep it running for another 6 months, I'm > only going to feel so bad for anyone that hasn't updated their software > for that length of time.
I don't think that's the case we're talking about here though. It's not like someone left their DNSBL unattended for months on end and ignored the mailing list announcement that said the list was going away and suddenly it broke. I'm thinking more along the lines of the ORSS that suddenly listed everything. For example blackholes.2mbit.com went bye bye back in May '02. I'm sure it was announced to NANAE but I never heard about it. I don't have the time to spend scouring NANAE for every little piece of news out there. blackholes.2mbit.com didn't offer an announcement mailing list (I don't believe I asked but I'm sure one wasn't mentioned on their site). They went down and the person running things didn't notice on our end until December of that year. BTW I'm psyched to see that they've been reincarnated as the AHBL. Woot! relays.osirusoft.com was taken down rather abruptedly. If Joe had an announcement mailing list many of us admins that used the ORSS could have removed the ORSS from our configs before he changed the list to the "everything's bad" state. Even if we only had a couple hours advance notice it would have helped many. I know the ORSS didn't have a list because I talked to Joe about it a number of times. IIRC Monkeys gave a couple week's notice on the demise of their list. I actually saw that one in NANAE. If I hadn't noticed though I wonder how long it would have been before I noticed I wasn't getting any more updates. Not all mail admins have the time to keep up with NANAE or NANAB(L). In fact few do. Really an announcement mailing list is a trivial thing to set up and effortless to admin (I've run many lists including discussion and announcement lists). I would gladly help pay for someone to maintain a good DNSBL and for the BW. I think most are afraid to accept $$ for it though because they think it implies a high level of accuracy and reliability. These people give us a great service. We should definitely pay for it I think. That's my $.02 anyhow. Justin
