At 6:36 PM 1/27/96 -0800, Rich Graves wrote:

On Sat, 27 Jan 1996, Bill Frantz wrote:

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At 7:55 PM 1/27/96 -0500, JMKELSEY@delphi.com wrote:

...

The best solution has always seemed to me to be one of these three:

a. Tags appended to notes/posts, from various reviewers, digitally signed and otherwise coded to allow intelligent filtering, or

b. Electronic distributions of reviewers' evaluations tagged to notes in some simple way. (I.e. give each note or post a unique ID which appears in the message.) Then, a smart newsreader/mail program sorts the notes accordingly, or

c. The reviewer reads the group/list, and rates posts according to some useful criteria. He then resends it out to his users, filtered as desired. (CP-LITE seems like a very early version of this.)

d. The "V-Chip" device makes a network query to the selected rating service to ask for a rating. What happen when the rating service is unreachable is just one of the many parameters that the parent needs to set. (If designed right, no parent could use it, but its availability would still stop the adult censorship croud in congress.)

This just gets ridiculous. It adds a lot of overhead without necessarily giving you good information.

... <lots of good rant deleted> Rich - Remember that this is NOT being designed for usability, only to stop a bad movement in congress. The reason I proposed solution (d) is that it adds no overhead to people who don't use it. (I propose using the Message-ID: header as a lookup ID for items received by email. I suspect it has spoofing problems, but perhaps congress won't notice.) Perhaps we should re-visit the need for usability if anyone really wants to use such a system themselves. As a parent, I always wanted my children to explore freely and discuss anything they found that bothered them. Bill