RATINGS: Subject tags

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

>If the disrupter is really
>motivated, he could have multiple identities and give positive ratings to
>his messages, so they would get through.

No one says you have to believe a particular rating.

>Unless someone else vouches for a message, it would not appear
>for a subscriber to the filtered list.

The system I want to experiment with for cypherpunks is not filtration
at the mailing list server but rather filtration at the user's end.
The "filtered list" is whatever passes through one's own filter.  I am
not talking about making toad into an extropians-style list with lots
of server operations.

>My suggestion is that the ratings be based on subject tags.  

I suggest that one kind of rating be based on subject tags, or primary
topic, or keywords, or something similar.  I also suggest that other
kinds of ratings exist.

Hal's suggestion is to make a rating based on salience to topic.  This
is fine, it allows a sheaf of related topics and concerns to be
unbundled according to a particular reader's viewpoint.

> a rating message
>would include some message identifier

There is already the right message identifier.  It appears in each
piece of mail in the header field Message-Id.

Eric