Nick Moffitt on Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:15:00 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] Moffitt Lameness Index


One of the things that has impressed me with nettime-l is how well it
rates on the Moffitt Lameness Index.

Long ago, I realized that all of the whiney posts on Linux User Group
mailing lists were coming from users of legacy Microsoft Windows
mailers.  I simply set up a filter to move all of the messages they
sent to the lists into a separate mailbox, and did the same thing for
my personal mail.

What I noticed, in addition to the S/N ratio on the lists seeming to
climb, was that I was now receiving virtually no spam in my personal
inbox.

So I refined the filters, added certain hostnames (such as aol.com and
yahoo.com), and certain other icky headers (such as Content-type:
text/html and any sort of Priority header).  The result, when combined
with some rules about when a message is actually to me, is a
surprisingly effective filter.

Of course, being a free software zealot, I tend not to exchange
e-mails with users of legacy proprietary operating systems much.  When
I do, they tend to be using some proprietary Unix, and have compiled a
free mailer (such as mutt) for it anyway.

I do not have any sorting going on for nettime-l, but instead color
messages according to their Moffitt value (red for weenie, white for
indifferent, cyan for people I enjoy reading, and green for me).

Nettime-l performs surprisingly well -- better than any other list I
am on (save for the crackmonkey.org list, which performs these filters
as a moderation technique).

In a sample of 1556 messages running from Oct 25 to the present day,
nettime-l had a grand total of 68 that ranked as Weenie on the Moffitt
Index, providing a Moffitt Lameness Value of 4.4%!  This translates to
a Moffitt S/N ratio of roughly 22 to one.

	Congratulations!

-- 
You are not entitled to your opinions.
 
	01234567 <- The amazing* indent-o-meter! 
        ^	    (*: Indent-o-meter may not actually amaze.)


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