Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!yale!lisper-bjorn
From: lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Take a sniff of Gnews
Message-ID: <25590@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 88 20:57:21 GMT
References: <1501@looking.UUCP> <34@ncar.ucar.edu> <7928@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Reply-To: lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT  06520-2158
Lines: 85

In article <7928@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (a small
gnews-ance) writes:
>In article <34@ncar.ucar.edu>, woods@ncar (Greg Woods) writes:
>>In article <1501@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>>>	b) Even smarter commands, which might check the article text
>>>	   to help make suggestions.
>
>>   We're talking serious AI here.
....
>And AI means Lisp, which Gnews is coded in.
....
>And as for the "serious AI" we're talking here: Greg, you're exaggerating.
>Remember ELIZA?  The program doesn't have to be great, just good enough to
>block noise noise noise that you and I and hundreds of other posters are
>absolutely sick of.

The simplest solution is of course to have a program that just says "no"
every time somebody tries to post something. This will effectively block out
all the noise. And it is very simple to code.

>Thus, looking for "Guin?ess" in articles crossposted to 4 or more news-
>groups, or counting the number of times "abortion" or "fetus" shows up in
>a non talk.abortion article, etc. are not terribly difficult tasks.  There
>are 100s of these kludges that could be tried.
[examples of "intelligent" screening messages deleted]

You wouldn't need only hundreds, you would need many, many more rules. This
is NOT as simple as a program as ELIZA that merely bounces back the input of
the user in the form of a question: "tell me more about your desire to post
to comp.foo.bar...." There are so many newsgroups, and so many possible
keywords for each newsgroups. Besides, just looking for keywords isn't
enough since they can mean different things in different context. A posting
to comp.parallel that mentions "abortion" 17 times doesn't have to be a
misdirected talk.abortion posting for instance, it could very well deal with
how to get rid of unwanted processes in a multiprocessor environment.
Language is another issue, discussions doesn't necessarily have to be in
English. Postings can be restricted to certain geographical areas and a
posting restricted to, say, West Germany could very well be in German, even
in a newsgroup where the discussion is primarily in English otherwise. This
IS serious AI and I don't think that even e-lisp will make such a screening
system feasible.

Even if such a screening mechanism WAS possible I would object to it. The
reason is that I think those participating in the discussion of a newsgroup
should decide the topic by themselves. Every newsgroup has a brief
categorization of suitable topics for discussion but what's interesting
within a certain category changes with time. A set of screening rules would
make everything much more rigid. The wonderful thing with usenet is that it
is what we make it to. A set of detailed screening rules, expressing what
somebody sometimes decided should be allowed or not allowed, will hamper
this basic principle.

Finally, who wants to get kicked around by a machine? It is bad enough with
the little message I get every time I try to post something:

"This program may post news to many machines.
 Are you absolutely sure that you want to do that? [ny]"

Not to mention the obnoxious 50% rule for inclusion of earlier postings.
Granted, it has spurred people's creativity to come up with bypassing
techniques like adding a lot of blank lines at the end or substituting ">"
with some other character. (Fortunately this rule isn't enforced at my site.)
Whenever I run a program I want to be the one that is in charge, not the
other way around. Having to fight my way through a set of well intended but
obnoxious rules questioning the contents of my postings would either give me
an ulcer or force me off usenet.

I do recognize the problem with junk postings that this screening technique
is supposed to solve. But I think this is the wrong way to do it. Those in
charge to take care of this problem are the other readers of the affected
newsgroups. It is possible to send e-mail to people generating too much
noise and ask them to stop. Sometimes flames ARE appropriate (although many
of them belong to the "noise").

>** Do we understand each other? (y or n)
n

Bjorn Lisper

PS. The original posting contained some adavertising for Gnews. I'm in no
way opposed to Gnews, as long as people with itching fingers don't try to
hack in their favorite prejudices about the subjects of certain newsgroups.
I haven't had the opportunity to use Gnews yet, but I use GNU emacs all the
time and if Gnews is to rn what GNU emacs is to other editors then it must
be good. DS