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Re: new posting guidline idea




Ira Abramov <ira@scso.com> writes:

> could we require that no posts should have an uninformative subject?
> will help me filter out garbage. if you are asking about netvision's
> ISDN, don't just use "help" in the subject, try "ISDN to netvision -
> need help" and it will help the readers a lot when they sift through the
> list.

It is a good idea, but is it enforceable? There already are good rules
spelled out on the Web page (a while ago I also suggested to
automatically mail them to every new subscriber, but was mildly flamed
for adding to an annoying thread). The problem is that (some)
subscribers don't pay attention to the rules and/or don't bother to
learn them. So uninformative subjects will appear, unless you have
some tool in mind that will weed out "uninformative" strings.

Let's think...  Sending all the messages with just "Help" or
"Unsibscribe me" to /dev/null will help a bit, but then you will want
to exclude "please help", "Help needed", but *not* every message with
"help" in the subject. If someone (the owner?) takes the trouble of
collecting uninformative headlines as they appear, making smart
regexps out of them, and expanding the list gradually, then in a
(relatively) short while the subject will become more informative on
the average.

Instead of dumping to /dev/null, the list might return the posting to
the author, telling him to read the guidelines on the web. The
guidelines must contain the up-to-date list of uninformative subjects,
of course.

One can fantasize, can't he? ;-)

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt          goldshmt@netvision.net.il   
BLOOMBERG L.P. (BFM)     oleg@bfr.co.il