Re: rough draft for changes at pkt - correction

[Bruce McFarling <brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 26 Sep 1995, Trond Andresen wrote:

> No, no, no. I oppose the introduction of any bureaucratic or technical
> mechanism which (even mildly) "blacklists" participants on PKT. The
> unbridled freedom of expression given by such a list, as opposed to all
> other media, is extremely valuable. IMO we don't fully appreciate the
> historically new and "unheard-of" freedom of expression made possible
> by the Internet. Instead we easily fall back to traditional
> old-fashioned censorship-oriented thinking. What we should do is strive
> to develop responsible behaviour, not invent "clever" and "moderate"
> censorship mechanisms.

	It really seems that there should be an 'open alternatives'
solution to the problem.  One approach would be to produce a digest of
pkt that is actually a _digest_, and not a collected works.  For example,
each subscriber to pkt could also be subscribed to the list pkt-vote.
Each subscriber could 'vote' for a message to be included in the 'Digest
of PKT This Week' by forwarding the message to pkt-vote.  Since there are
message count filters available, the 'votes' from each subscriber could
easily be set to a given number.  Set a quota on number of votes each
message requires to be placed in the digest, say 5% of the subscriber
base.  Or set a quota on the number of messages to be included, with the
top 'n' messages included.  [Or use Australian rules voting, but I won't
go into that].  Voila.  Run a filter on the messages received by pkt-vote
to pick out the message id of the forwarded message, collate the votes on
Sunday, and put out the weekly digest on Monday.
	I could go on at length, and under current rules am encouraged to
in order to forestall a later clarification that might use up my message
quota just before a good discussion starts, but I won't.

Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx