[spambayes-dev] Upgraded proxy UI...

[Tony Meyer]

> I've made some user interface changes for web training of 
> spambayes.  I like them and can prepare a patch if there is
> general interest...

A patch would be great, thanks.  It's probably best if you open a tracker on
sourceforge and put it there, since it's easy to keep track of it.  I'm not
sure if everyone here reads the bugs list, so it's probably also wise to
post a note pointing out the link to the tracker.

> 1) I added two check boxes to the review page, next to the 
> "Previous, Refresh, Next" buttons.  The first is called 
> "Trim Extremes" and the second is called "Rescore Messages".

I'm not sure about these being checkboxes.  Couldn't "Rescore Messages" just
be a button that refreshes the current page, but recalculates the scores as
well?  That seems more intuitive to me, and simpler to use, too.  Same sort
of thing for "Trim Extremes" as well.

> 3) "Trim Extremes", if checked removes messages that score 
> closer to perfect than the respective trim level settings.
> This "declutters" the review for training on unsures and
> "non-well" scored ham/spam.

I'm not sure about this.  How well would the method proposed (on
spambayes at python.org, not here) by Anthony suit you instead?  My concern is
that if this is on the page by default, it'll get used when it shouldn't and
people will miss false positives that score really high and false negatives
that score really low (which are messages screaming out for training).
Seeing the code might convince me, maybe.

> 4) "Rescore messages" displays recalculated scores for all 
> the messages instead of the original scores.  This is useful
> for finding non-extreme messages in older untrained messages.
> It's particularly valuable when you score periodically.
> It means you don't score on many examples of the same spam
> received over a period of days...

This sounds like a useful addition, and was also just suggested by Anthony.

(I should have suggested this in my reply to Anthony, too, but didn't think
of it - hopefully he's reading this).  Would an option, rather than a
button, be better?  i.e. a boolean option called something like
"always_rescore".  If False, everything is like now, if True, then the score
displayed is always the one that the message would score at the time the
page is loaded.  I like this more than a button, but then if you're thinking
that you'd sometimes want the current score and sometimes the (faster!)
original score, then a button would be better.

=Tony Meyer