Oxygenating the flame in threads was Re: [extropy-chat] a futurist prediction

[Emlyn]

On 26/08/05, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> My idea is similar, only people vote by filtering the
> offender rather than having some sort of organized
> balloting. You are the computer guy, Eugen, so can
> this be done?

IANAE, but here are my two cents...

Filters are passive client side things, so there's no way to detect their use.

What you could possibly do is set up an email address - say
extropy-crap at lists.extropy.org. People could forward email they
disliked to that address, as a vote against it. Instead of killfiling
someone, you could forward their entire output to that address, as a
permanent mark of disdain!

I guess you'd also want an extropy-great at lists.extropy.org, to send
excellent posts and favoured postors to.

With something like that in place and publicised, you've got a voting
mechanism accomplished entirely by email (useful, because I think it
has become clear over time that most members use email exclusively,
not the web forum that I assume still exists).

If you were feeling particularly motivated, you could calculate
aggregate "quality" scores for postors, and put that score in each
subject line or email body sent by the person (that is, it would be
added by the server).

With some carefully formatted subject line tags, clever email users
might find that they can actually filter on the quality score in the
future.

The possibilities of such a mechanism are quite large, I think.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *