On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 08:50:55AM -0800, Richard Chycoski wrote:
Instead of deleting anything that you can't identify, how about marking it as 'unknown', and making it easy for users to claim later?
That was going to be a subsequent phase of the project. At the moment, there is no way to "mark" the data at all - it either exists or it doesn't. What we were considering doing is importing the DNS entries into the portal, then requiring that each be claimed by someone within some period of time - perhaps a year or two. After that, unclaimed entries would be deleted.
The existing DNS entries have an ownership field, based on who entered them into the DNS database. That was added a few years ago, so there are a lot of entries with null ownership. Unfortunately, there are older entries which are still valid but have null ownership because they were added to the database before it had an ownership attribute.
This brings up the question of who is to be the owner of a DNS entry. Should it be the individual or group who asked for it to be added to the DNS or should it be the coordinator who entered it? The former would mean that hundreds of people would have to register with the portal and take ownership of each of their entries. The latter would mean that it would be up to the coordinators to keep track of who is still active (or still alive!) and delete entries for people who are no longer around. Neither is a satisfactory solution.
The goal is to have a tidy DNS database, with only entries that are valid as is possible. I am open to suggestions. - Brian