From: Bryce <wilcoxb@nagina.cs.colorado.edu>
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 11:26:45 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: noise levels
In-Reply-To: <199601181520.KAA06653@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <199601190051.RAA28314@nagina.cs.colorado.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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 An entity calling itself Perry <perry@piermont.com> allegedly
wrote:
>
> The noise levels around here are getting astounding.

<snip>


Perry, I quite agree with you.  I am having a very difficult
time wading through cpunks, and I am currently reduced to
grepping for my name, and then picking out a topic or two by
subject line before junking 95% of the posts.  Since you have
such enthusiasm for solving the noise problem I suggest that we
do the following:


1.  Establish a "one-way" mailing list.  If you don't have an 
ISP which makes this convenient then I recommend Sameer's 
Community ConneXion.  It costs merely $7.50/month, it is very 
easy to create a mailing list, Sameer respects your privacy and
understands the importance of privacy and security issues, and
you can pay in Mark Twain Ecash.

2.  Write a script for your mail agent so that when you see a
noise post you can hit a key combination and send off a message
to all the recipients of your mailing list which identifies the
message (by its Message-ID, I suppose?) as trash.

3.  I will subscribe to your list.

4.  I will configure my mail user-agent to automatically delete
messages which have been identified by you as trash.



What do you say?  I'm up for it.


Hey, come to think of it I have a mailing list at C2 that isn't
being used for anything.  It is fortuitously named "c2punks".
Go ahead and send your "trash-o-meter" messages there and I will
receive them.  (That's "c2punks@c2.org".)



Of course there are some things we should work out as we go:


1.  You should PGP-sign your trash-o-meter messages.  Don't
worry about doing it on a secure box (who's going to crack your
e-mail hardware just so they can force me to read trash or 
delete cpunks mail from my inbox?).  You can configure your MUA 
to pass the passphrase to PGP (or have no passphrase) so that 
all you have to do is hit a single key combination to activate 
the "trashit" script.


2.  You might wonder what you are getting out of this?  I can
name 3 things:
   a.  Reducing the amount of c'groupies noise that I read, and
the amount of c'groupies noise that anyone else who subscribes
to "c2punks" reads.
   b.  Advancing the theory and practice of distributed ratings
systems.
   c.  I and others will reciprocate-- we will mail
"trash-o-meter" messages to c2punks which you can use so as to
read less trash yourself.


3.  I'll write some scripts that people can use to process 
trash-o-meter messages.  The first version will probably be in
sh and written for the mh mail-handling system.  Later versions
will work with different mail-handling systems, incorporate such
nifty features as author- and subject- trashing in addition to
message-trashin, having weighted scalar ratings, different
ratings categories, and so forth.


I'm entirely serious about this.  For the first iteration just
send something like "TRASH Message-ID: XXXXXXXXX" in the subject
line or the body.  We can discuss this in detail on c2punks if
it gets too specific to be on-topic in cpunks.  (What's your
flavor of MUA?  I'll write the trashit script for you.)



Regards,

Bryce

signatures follow


      "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."  -Tennyson
            <a href="http://www.c2.org/~bryce/Niche.html">

                          bryce@colorado.edu                </a>



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