From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 13:58:12 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: automated moderation system
Message-ID: <199702072158.NAA01634@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



here's an idea for a simple "moderation" system with no
one-moderator bottleneck/choke point. I'm trying to come
up with a constructive solution with cyberspatial spirit.
please send me email if you would be willing to try this system. 
flames ignored. if there is enough support I may be able to
persuade a friend to write the code to do this.

a new mailing list is set up, one that gets posts from a
noisy mailing list. it filters the mail according to user
preferences, and sends it out to its own subscribers. the
filtering scheme is as follows:

a web site is set up that allows people to express their
own preferences as to who they wish to listen to in particular,
and who they wish to killfile, based on email address. 
first, they hit the web site
and have it send them a secret password to their email address.
then they use that password to edit their "pass" and "zap"
lists. (the password is for authentication)

now, the mailing list works as follows. people always receive
posts from people they put on their "pass" lists. mail from
entities on their "zap" lists is always trashed.

why are the lists kept on the server? the usefulness of this
scheme is that now you have information about all entities,
the number of votes to "pass" each entity, and the number of
votes to "zap" each entity. now lets say that the system is
considering sending me mail from someone that is neither on
my pass or zap lists. I have no personal info on it, but the
system could use the votes in some algorithmic way to decide
whether to send it to me or not. various experiments could
be tried to come up with a good scheme.

 my preference is at
the moment something like this: every person indicates how
much mail they wish to recieve from the list, and how much
of a delay is acceptable. the system uses this information
and the "pass/zap" ratio (or difference) to send out the
"highest rated" messages in a given time window. during
low list traffic, the messages that pass through would be
ranked lower. or, the system could have a ranking threshold
set by each individual user below which it will never pass 
the email.

my feeling is to keep these lists public, although the scheme
would allow a system that kept them private. of course I will
be flamed for this.

the system of course is essentially a reputation system, something
everyone here talks about but nobody really seems to know what
one is or how to set one up.

anyway, I hope to hear from anyone with comments. if you might
be able to support a cgi web site for the idea, please let me
know. technically the system is pretty straightforward. my 
experience with these systems is that the great difficulty is
getting people to try them, the "critical mass" problem.