The filtering/reptuations/volume issue has come up again. And a couple of people are planning "reputation servers." I applaud them for the effort, but I don't see them as needed for our list, right now. That is, I don't plan to use them. * what most people need are tools to filter out messages they don't want to read. As we don't yet have quasi-intelligent agents that can do this for us, this generally involves: - filtering based on thread - filtering based on author * having these tools is more important to me than having a database of what other people think about other people (reputation data bases). There are several approaches: * Unix kill-files, for those with the shells that support them * Eudora-type filtering (ironically, Eudora is sold by Qualcomm, Phil Karn's company), which allows various kinds of sorting. * Extropians-style filtering, now being developed as a commercial product by Harry Shapiro and Ray Cromwell. (To be clear about things, Hugh Daniel, Eric Hughes, etc., expressed their willingness to install the Extropians-style software shortly after it became available, almost 2 years ago. Various delays ensued, then the offer by the authors was put in limbo, then the commercialization phase ensued.) * Anyone can operate a refector for the list, as per several statements on this. Hal Finney, for example, offered (offers?) an encrypted-only version. My point: someone could set up a filtering service, a digester, whatever, and others could subscribe. (Yes, Robert Hayden did this for a few weeks. While it may not have been his "fault" that it went down, it shows the generally flaky and catch-as-catch-can nature of so many part-time, hobbyist systems. Like the remailers that go down when the laptop running it gets taken to Spain for the summer :-}. A "for profit" service, at some quarterly fee and with a contractual relationship to continue service, is a better long-term approach.) I sympathize with the concerns of Phil Karn and others, but let me give a warning about this. The Extropians list, when I was on it, had about the same volume at its peak that we now have, about 50-100 messages a day. Much debate about S/N ensued, much talk about charging a fee for posting, about setting up quotas, about about official reputation markets. At least 20% of all list traffic in some weeks was devoted to kvetching about this problem. A "reputation market" called the Hawthorne Exchange was set up, as discussed here by Hal Finney (and also by me in my FAQ..grep for Hawthorne or HEx). Even more jawboning went on. And then of course there what the new list software. This allowed folks to exclude authors, threads, etc., at the _point of distribution_. Is this a good idea.? Well, if one excluded 10% of the traffic, then it would "save" having to receive 5-10 messages a day. Big deal. I used the ExI software, and found it an interesting experiment, but I can't say it save me any real effort. The effort of sending the filtering message to the list site, hassling with the formats, etc., clearly outweighed the tiny effort it would have taken to manually press "d" to delete the messages when then appeared. I also found it useful to at least spend the 2-5 seconds to see what was being talked about before pressing "D." (A side issue: Whatever seconds were saved by the distribution-point filtering (and I haven't mentioned the CPU time required...an issue for us to consider with 700 list members) on the Extropians list were often negated for the others by people asking "What are you talking about?" or "Could someone send me Joe's posting on foo--I had him in my ::exclude file.") In other words, I find just being real fast on the "D" key is my best way to cope with list volume. Your mileage may vary, but I doubt that the Extropians-style software is going to help much...I used it, and my experiences are what I just described. Filtering is the wave of the future. Paul Baclace, sometimes on this list, was working on filter agents for Usenet that could learn preferences. And I've seen such things with WAIS. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."