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Automatically detecting inactive vendors (was Re: a little bit suspicious)



On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 09:23:29PM +0200, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> 
(...)
> remove it. deburl is also not working any more

I wonder: shouldn't we have an automate task to do this tasks? We have a
script at the website sources (testvendors.pl) written by Craig Small in 2001
which certainly looks like it needs to be updated to support the current
format of the vendors.CD file.

[ some minutes of hacking later ] 

I have updated the testvendors.pl to make it possible to work with
vendors.CD.  However, there is still room for improvement:

- the script could checkout the DNS and whois to determine who is
  in charge of both the website domain and the email domain and report it (to
  detect domains that have been taken over and that report 200 OK with any
  URL)

- the script could (optionally) send a pre-formatted email to the vendor
  setting a Reply-To: debian-www, that way we could test the email
  addresses to detect the case when the website is up but the email address
  is no longer valid

With or without these improvements shouldn't we run these tests, lets say,
monthly and drop those vendors that are dead? Maybe an automatic yearly email
reminder would be in order too.

Opinions?

We currently have 179 vendors in our listing, IMHO we should strive to 
proactively detect dead vendors and unlist them.

Regards

Javier

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