[TLS] Re: Response to CoI Complaints

On Jul 16, 2026, at 13:34, Thomas Fossati <[email protected]> wrote:
> At times it seems to me that we are reaching the limits of the open
> society model that the IETF has adopted for itself, and I cannot see
> what measures we could take to restore the community to an acceptable
> state.
> The reality is that our model relies on everyone adhering to
> fundamental, albeit unwritten, meta-rules.  Which breaks the moment a
> sufficient number of people fail to follow (or succeed to manipulate)
> them.

Actually we just did a whole long process to enable closer moderation, and then what we saw here on the TLS mailing list was a complete absence of such moderation. The only moderation that was applied was based on someone's .signature, which to me was a trivial side issue. The main issue was the repeated abusive behavior and the utter failure of any responsible party to moderate it.

I say this not to beat anybody up—the reason for this has been explained: the mod team is in the process of being created and hasn't written any guidelines yet. To which my rejoinder is: that sounds like a call to action. I won't speculate about the future—I'm worried, but we can only do our best going forward.

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