How this becomes an RFC

Where it stands

• Internet-Draft -00 written done

  Full text, formula, reference implementation, nftables config, and test vectors.

• Reference implementations done

  Interoperable Python and Go: the formula, a real NFQUEUE-based MITM for each, and a demo server/client pair exercising Sections 7 and 8 — cross-checked against Appendix C and against each other. See the repository.

• Format conversion done

  Converted to RFCXML v3 and validated against the real xml2rfc toolchain — structurally clean, with live references resolved from the IETF's own bibliography. draft-traviss-evil-byte-00.xml.

• Public read-through in progress

  This site. A joke RFC that nobody has read is just a Markdown file with delusions.

• Submit via the IETF Datatracker

  Filed at datatracker.ietf.org/submit as an individual submission. The authors get an email verification request; once confirmed, it's posted and citable as draft-traviss-evil-byte-00.

• Independent Submission Stream

  Nothing here belongs to a Working Group, so the two real paths to an RFC number were the Independent Submission Stream (reviewed by the ISE) or a sitting Area Director willing to sponsor it into the IETF stream. April 1 RFCs have gone both ways; this one goes to the ISE. That choice is why the draft is marked Informational rather than Standards Track — the Independent Stream does not publish Standards Track documents, whatever the document itself claims to be.

• RFC Editor queue & April 1 timing

  The RFC Editor accepts April 1 submissions from anyone, and considers them for that year's batch if they arrive properly formatted at least two weeks before the date. Everything else about the queue — AUTH48, cross-review — applies as normal.

• Publication

  Targeted for 1 April 2027. The -00 is dated for the day it was filed and expires 13 March 2027, so a refreshed revision has to land before then — dated 1 April, for the RFC Editor’s April batch. RFC 3514 gets obsoleted, on schedule, twenty-four years after it was filed.

How to help

In rough order of usefulness.

Anything about the document itself — a broken weight, a registration that makes no sense, a section that stops being funny — goes to rtraviss@evilbyte.net, which is the address in the draft's Author's Address. Bugs in the code, the site, or the ERA are better as repository issues; anything security-shaped should follow security.txt instead.

Further reading

• datatracker.ietf.org/submit — the actual Internet-Draft submission tool.
• authors.ietf.org — Submitting your Internet-Draft — the current, canonical author's guide.
• RFC 3514 — the evil bit, which this document proposes to obsolete.
• April Fools' Day Request for Comments — Wikipedia — background on the tradition and its rules.
• RFC 2551 — a parody of the real standards process (RFC 2026), in the same April 1 tradition this document is aiming for.
• xkcd 927 — Standards — fourteen competing standards become fifteen; see Section 1.
• xkcd 221 — Random Number — a fake RFC 1149.5, in the same register Section 9 uses for the real RFC 1149.