[spambayes-dev] Nuke experimental_ham_spam_imbalance_adjustment?

[Tim Peters]

[Mark Hammond]
> As far as I understand it, experimental_ham_spam_imbalance_adjustment
> has been found to be ineffective,

It seemed OK so long as the data didn't get *too* unbalanced -- when there
was extreme imbalance, it was not only ineffective, it did major harm.

> and that all default options have now set this to False.

I hope so.  That was the plan.

> However, there is an issue regarding existing users of the addin.  For
> Outlook in particular, if an old copy of "default_bayes_customize.ini"
> exists, we do not copy our new version over it.  As
> experimental_ham_spam_imbalance_adjustment was set to True in early
> versions, this option will remain in effect, even when these users
> upgrade to newer versions.
>
> I don't think a similar issue exists with the other apps.
>
> Short term, the solution seems to be to nuke
> experimental_ham_spam_imbalance_adjustment from classifier.py -
> unless of course, there is some good reason to leave it for continued
> experiments (in which case I would just force it False in the Outlook
> init code)

Na, it's a proven loser.  I just deleted the code from classifier.py, and
reworded some of the docs.  Options.py still knows about it, though, to
avoid breaking any .ini file that still references it.  I'm not sure how to
get rid of it completely.

> Longer term, I think the way we copy this file to the users data
> directory was a mistake, and I am likely to fix it (there is a bug on
> it from a confused user).
>
> Any thoughts?

Unsure what you have in mind -- but doubt it's insane <wink>.