Summary

  • A user said a 12 October sourceapp registration email had gone unanswered by 2 November; RIPEstat apologised and completed the registration that day.
  • RIPEstat says the identifier can be used immediately. The email connects a label to a contact for support and usage analysis.

The door was open. The clerk took three weeks to say so. On 2 November, a RIPEstat Data API user posted on RIPE NCC's forum that an email sent on 12 October to register a sourceapp identifier had received no reply. Twenty-one calendar days later, RIPEstat team member Agustín Formoso apologised for the missed response, said the team had followed up by email and registered the identifier, and gave the detail that should have been in the first line of the instructions: users can put the identifier into API requests immediately.

That detail changes the operator's clock. A sourceapp is a name attached to requests so RIPEstat can connect usage to a contact and help when something breaks. Registration creates that contact link. The parameter is available before that contact link is created. The Data API documentation asks regular users to email RIPEstat’s registration mailbox with the identifier and a reachable address, and specifically asks users planning more than 1,000 requests a day to register. It also caps concurrent requests at eight per source IP. An operator reading “please register” before building a scheduled data feed could reasonably wait for a reply; the RIPEstat team's public answer says the feed could already carry the label.

This public thread records one missed answer. It contains the user's account of the 12 October email and RIPE's acknowledgement of a missed reply; the original mailbox receipt and cause are absent. A timestamped mail record and RIPE's handling history would establish the exact delay and why it happened. The immediate practical fact is clear: the name on the request and the contact behind it run on different clocks.