Re: low-quality posts

[Cyber City <cyber1@io.org>]

Derek Upham <upham@cs.ubc.ca> wrote:

> There are two ways to filter for content: filter at the newsgroup
> source via moderators, or filter at the newsgroup destinations via
> killfiles.  Moderating does seem to get rid of most of the cruft, but
> the moderators are required to read every post that comes through,
> and, worse, make judgements with some degree of impartiality (which is
> not always possible).

There's a simpler solution.  Using the majordomo hack I posted earlier,
mail from known abusers would be bounced to the moderator for his
approval or rejection.  This would be a small volume, which should
be within the capabilities of one moderator.

It's important to note that even abusive posters have their moments
of lucidity.  For example, one or two of Detwelier's posts were
actually worth reading.  So a wholesale and automatic filtering
would be wrong.

As for the marginal stuff, it should be passed for redistribution,
and the end-users should be educated on means to do their own
filtering.  For example, here's a simple scheme to employ the
filter distributed with ELM:

.forward file: "|/path/to/filter -vo $HOME/.elm/filter-errors"

.elm/filter-rules file:

if (from = "lassie") then save "~/mail/nal"
if (to contains "cypherpunks") then save "~/mail/Cypher"

--
Alex Brock