RATINGS: strn has the right features (was Subject tags)

["Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@paycheck.cygnus.com>]

>> shared seem to be binary in nature, simply to include articles in
>> virtual lists of articles.

Strn has a couple of unrelated but relevant features. The virtual
newsgroups, as discussed, are a lot more powerful than you'd think --
in fact, they could be ideal for the Ratings system. Virtual
newsgroups can be constructed from arbitrary lists of message-id's...
the intent, I think, was to use nngrep and such to supply them, but
you could just as easily use the result of post-processing your
ratings-list to generate them. (Virtual newsgroups can be constructed
from a number of sources, actually, both "live" and with
preprocessing.)

On *top* of that (ie. at the reader's side of the system, regardless
of whether the group is real or virtual) you have a scoring system,
which is based on applying regular expression patterns to messages,
and producing scores. (For example, I read comp.sys.palmtops because I
have an hp100, so I have a positive score for subject:.*hp100, but I'm
also interested in new things that might show up there, but I know I
*don't* care about the Tandy Zoomer, so /zoomer/ gets a negative
score.) Scores are cumulative on an article. Since strn is built on
trn, if a score gets you to read an article mid-thread, you can easily
move around in the 2d representation of the thread, even if those
items didn't score as well.

>> agent, but it seems not to have the social goals that the ratings
>> proposal I have in mind does.

I think it has the flexibility to implement most, if not all, of what
you want your ratings system to provide.  (Pedantic point -- would it
not be more correct to say that *you* have social goals, not the
rating system -- the system is merely your tool...)

strn works quite will with a local news spool, and is supposed to work
with an XOVER database (or whatever the other equivalent was) if
you're using NNTP. 
							_Mark_