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To: Spots who wrote (410)	2/7/1998 11:04:00 AM
From: Michael Coley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32883

RE: Another Possibility. I really don't like the idea of ignoring people. I'd rather see it tied to specific messages than to people. How about an option to allow people to rank messages as they read them? Then, you can set a "minimum rank" that you want to read on each thread. You could have a ranking system like: 1 - Useless 2 - Off Topic 3 - Fair 4 - Good 5 - Must Read Then, as people read through it, a few would probably take the time to rank the messages and later readers could skip messages ranked below a certain level. If you're just wanting to get rid of the useless messages, you could pick a lower rank. If you're wanting to skip the off topic messages, you could use a rank somewhere in the middle. If you're really busy or have a lot of messages to catch up on, you could skip everything but the best messages with a higher rank. There are a number of programming issues in creating a ranking system like this, but they could be easily resolved: 1) You wouldn't want a small number of people to be able to set the rank. To get around this, just consider a message unranked until a certain number of people (10?) ranked it. 2) You wouldn't want people voting more than once on a message. Here, you could either keep a list of everyone's votes on a message, or at least the most recent N votes (100?). 3) The database to keep track of this could be large if you store everyone's votes. Probably best to store a total score, total number of votes, and the most recent N votes (100?). The rank would just be the total score divided by the total number of votes, and every time someone voted you would just check the list of recent votes, back out their previous vote if they had voted recently, increment the number of votes, add the rank voted for to the total score, and insert the vote in the list of recent votes. All that being said, I'm still fundamentally against the idea of filtering messages. There's just not a foolproof way to do it. If it is considered or implemented, I would highly recommend that it be tested on a single thread that has a lot of "noise" on it, and perhaps only implemented on a thread-by-thread basis. - Michael Coley - wwol.com