From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 13:50:02 CST
rbabel@babylon.pfm-mainz.de (Ralph Babel) suggested:
> Henry Spencer wrote:
>
> > This is an interesting idea. Has it been implemented?
>
> How about filtering based on the contents of the "Approved:" header?
This is off-topic, but "he started it," and I'll never get a better
chance to run this by technically astute people.
Assume a moderated newsgroup with robomoderation, such that all posts
are encrypted with the moderator's private key and sent out, marked
either "approved," "SPAM" or "unknown" in the Keywords field or some
field for just that use. Anything which didn't pass through the
moderator will not be properly encrypted, so forgery is pretty obvious.
All new posters would be "unknown" initially. As posters establish a
track record they would be moved by the moderator to the "approved"
category. The moderator could establish other categories if desired,
like dubious for posts which have some SPAM characteristics.
The reason I think this is useful is that the moderator doesn't have to
check all posts in real time, because they all go out. And readers can
select to see what they want, so there is no possible issue of
censorship.
Note that this would also work if the posts were just digitally signed,
if that solves legal problems for anyone.
This intrigues me to the point where I intend to write the moderator
code and a drop-in for Cleanfeed this spring or summer (I'm doing a 15
machine distributed news upgrade right now). If anyone like the idea
feel free to contact me. And if there's a big hole in this I miss, tell
me that, too!
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me