[Mailman-Developers] personal server-side filtering

[Eugene Leitl]

Hi.

Another list I'm on often goes into regimes with bad signal/noise 
regularly provoking cries for moderation. Here's a scheme I/friend 
of mine come with --I'd like to know how difficult it would be to 
add to mailman (particularly, where to massage it in).

"To recapitulate: my original proposal was to establish a pair of
lists: fnord-moderated/fnord-unmoderated. Everything rejected from
fnord-moderated would go to fnord-unmoderated that anybody
who subscribed to both lists would get the full feed, if so inclined. 

This scheme is simple to implement, but has obvious flaws. To avoid
pressing anybody in a single quality metric it should be possible to
associate each subscriber with a ranking matrix against the other
participants (which could be inquirable remotely). With 1 k subscribers
this means keeping track of 1 M short integers, which is tolerable
nowadays (besides, this can be implemented as sparse matrix). Each 
mail will be attached a pair of urls/listserv commands to 
increment/decrement your individual ranking of the poster this mail 
came from. The matrix gets initialized with zero. All positive values
including zero mean no filtering. -1 means every second post gets 
through, -2 every third, etc. 

This doesn't include topic filtering, but this can be addressed
separately. To address this, we can agree on an initial keyword pool
(META:SPACE:GUNS: etc.) and make the listserv let through only
properly classified messages. If a message is unclassified it gets
send back with a list of current keywords. There should be a mechanism 
of creating new keywords, and discarding obsolete ones (e.g. by aging).

I'm fairly certain it would be possible to hack mailman into
supporting this. Does anybody see any obvious flaws in the scheme?"

So, any comments on that?

TIA,

Eugene