* 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.)
Just to clear this up, this freeware code was never put into limbo. I believe Harry talked to Hugh several times in e-mail but Hugh didn't have the time to put up with the installation (hint: it's harder than majordomo to install since they are tons of configuration options. You know, like the list statistics, what filtering agents to use, digest format, incoming filters, accounting database, etc) If anyone is willing to provide a machine, I will gladly give and/or install my mailing list software, and then subscribe it to cypherpunks. (during the development phase, this is exactly how me and Harry tested the list. We subscribed to several mailing lists and had the list software do the filtering) This is more optimal anyway. If the vast majority of people don't want filtering, there is no need to waste cpu cycles by running it as the main cypherpunks list.
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.
Yes, and this is a recognized problem, and one of the things we are going to eliminate in the commercial version. Basically, the "send a msg to a mail server" form of command processing is too painful to use except infrequently (such as ::resend) The technique of using "in-band" commands within a post was my first attempt to reduce the pain of sending commands (by allowing you to postpone any commands, and then include then in one of your posts later) One of the ways to alleviate "transaction cost" of list commands is to use client side scripts. For instance, for list administration, I wrote Harry a "hot key" perl script which takes over elm's Print function. When Harry needs to do something, he hits 'p', and then chooses an option. (for instance, to add a user, he types 'pa'. I could easily create a similar thing for anyone using elm who wanted to exclude based on a single key-press)
I also found it useful to at least spend the 2-5 seconds to see what was being talked about before pressing "D."
The real use of the Extropians software comes in "exclude all" mode, resend thread, and digest. Most of the people I see using the list filtering (from the logs), do something of the following: 1) exclude all 2) read the 'filterlist' every 12 hours. If something looks interesting, do ::resend thread, and get a digest containing that thread only. 3) include specific threads and authors. The only thing I ever use the filtering system for is to exclude individual users, or annoying threads. (d for everything else, like you)
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.
I think it is superior to majordomo and listserv for other reasons (remember, the filtering stuff is merely a "plug in" agent which could be replaced with any filtering or reputation system) For instance, the reputation system writers could use it as a platform to write a reputation based filtering system if they wanted to.
Filtering is the wave of the future.
Definately. I fear there will be no good solution though until we get atleast some partial natural language understanding. -Ray