From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 94 14:23:00 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: RATINGS: Subject tags
Message-ID: <199402222056.MAA15491@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
> >If the disrupter is really
> >motivated, he could have multiple identities and give positive ratings to
> >his messages, so they would get through.
> 
> No one says you have to believe a particular rating.

This would imply that subscribers see the source of each rating.
You would have to know that in order to judge whether to believe one or
not.  But I think this might consume too much bandwidth.  With possibly
many raters, each producing a potentially multi-dimensional rating per
message, this would be a lot of stuff to send along with each message.

My suggestion would be to just present the union of all the subject
tags produced by the raters.  This is a moderate amount of information,
and to the extent that raters agree on subject tags it could in many
cases be a very succinct presentation.  We don't want to make this too
unwieldy.

> >Unless someone else vouches for a message, it would not appear
> >for a subscriber to the filtered list.
> 
> The system I want to experiment with for cypherpunks is not filtration
> at the mailing list server but rather filtration at the user's end.
> The "filtered list" is whatever passes through one's own filter.  I am
> not talking about making toad into an extropians-style list with lots
> of server operations.

This makes sense, but there must still be two lists: one, the "raw" list,
which is seen (at least) by raters and contains messages which have not
yet been rated; and the other, the "rated" list, which has the rated
messages.  My suggestion was that messages which did not receive any
ratings by anyone would not make it into the rated list.  Obviously an
alternative would be to send it out tagged to show that no one cared
enough to rate it.

> >My suggestion is that the ratings be based on subject tags.  
> 
> I suggest that one kind of rating be based on subject tags, or primary
> topic, or keywords, or something similar.  I also suggest that other
> kinds of ratings exist.
> 
> Hal's suggestion is to make a rating based on salience to topic.  This
> is fine, it allows a sheaf of related topics and concerns to be
> unbundled according to a particular reader's viewpoint.

This could also be used for negative ratings: subject tags such as
"flame", "faq", "rant", etc. could be used to give more information than
just the topic of the message.  People could set up their own systems to
filter the message to exclude messages with certain of these tags.

> > a rating message
> >would include some message identifier
> 
> There is already the right message identifier.  It appears in each
> piece of mail in the header field Message-Id.

Message-ID is probably OK, but it is kind of long.  Many mail agents will
insert an "In-Reply-To" into the header which identifies the message ID,
but not all will.  It would be a real pain to type one in manually.
Another advantage of numbering messages sent on the "raw" list would be
that people would be able to tell when they have missed messages (but that
is irrelevant to the ratings issue, I admit).

Hal