-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01 iQCVAwUBMP7qj/WZSllhfG25AQHmmwP9FbAxfvWz1SwQP0AeEUFODVnGVFSCgkxS YzqzskooI8BZYEhBJVKSidM/jf3Hr/D+T5MsXsavH3hZ9aS5O4qYjuJO+7Y78bGe NaCszo+OcScJXWQn2UdLEo3bsYNoNF3smXD/nndce5pMucAjxTb2Mzd/T3UbKAtH AJZl7W2wUNw= =Ulv6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----