Re: [Pan-users] GNKSA

[Steven D'Aprano]

Beartooth wrote:

> 	But I do claim the blind hen's occasional grain of corn : we need 
> to optimize against the likely abuses of the twenty-teens, whatever we 
> can guess of those. 

I don't know what this means.

> 	Hesitant, second-hand example : I've encountered intelligent 
> posters on a wide variety of topics who say they filter out all posts 
> from Google Groups. (I don't go near GG, and wouldn't know how to do the 
> filtering if I did.) Ought we to take some account (not flat filtering, 
> but some more differentiated response) of that source? 

No. Pan should not hard code "Google Groups is Evil", not even as an 
option. What Pan should do is use the existing scoring functionality and 
allow people to specify *any* source, not just GG.


> 	Better example : are there ways Pan could help with such spam as 
> gets past news servers? If I used Alpine as a newsreader, I bet I could 
> make filters like the ones I use for Alpine email.

I suspect this is going to be hard, because I guess there is little 
point trying to classify messages as spam based only on the headers.

Some people might download all messages for later off-line reading, and 
they might value a spam filter. Other people, like me, only download 
messages I want to read, and if I see something that looks like spam, I 
just don't click on the damn thing.

Any solution that involves Pan automatically downloading every message 
ahead of time is unacceptable to me. There are newsgroups where the 
signal to noise ratio is tiny (one useful post to thousands of rubbish 
posts), but none of it is spam. The last thing I want is for Pan to 
automatically download 3,000 emails purporting to prove that pi is an 
exact fraction in order to classify them as ham, when I have no interest 
in reading the ravings of maths nutters and crankpots.


> 	And how about links to malware sites? One trick there is to 
> install Dillo and make it the default browser. There's a lot it won't do, 
> by design; but it's fast, and it usually gives you enough of a look to 
> decide if you want to paste a URL into some other browser. Maybe Pan 
> could default to using Dillo, and give the user an option to install it 
> if need be, or to change the default.

Pan should use the system browser, or allow the user to specify a custom 
browser. If the user wishes to install Dillo and use it, they should go 
right ahead. Or use Firefox with appropriate ad-block and 
malware-blocking plugins. Or my favourite browser, Any Damn Program The 
User Likes *wink*

There's no need for Pan to hold the user's hand by default. If you want 
to use Dillo, go right ahead, but don't make it "standard" and expect 
others to change it.



--
Steven