Re: NoCeM flakiness in 0.74 and higher

[David Moore <dmoore@UCSD.EDU>]

Sudish Joseph <sudish@mindspring.com> writes:

> It's trying to fetch the entire spool each time (well, I kill it
> at the start).  
> 
> My News/NoCeM/active has:
> (setq gnus-nocem-active (quote (
> 	("news.admin.net-abuse.announce" (10845 . 11363))
> 	("alt.nocem.misc" (25378 . 26700)))))	
> 
> news.lists.filters isn't in there coz I just upgraded to 0.76 in the
> hopes of getting proper treatment for alt.nocem.misc (which, BTW,
> shouldn't be checked anymore, right? Or maybe not, I haven't been
> following this stuff.)  No dice, 0.76 just tried to get everything
> again.

	news.lists.filters replaces alt.nocem.misc and
news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins replaces news.admin.net-abuse.announce.
I left the old ones in there for the time being, since there are still
some messages in them to allow a smoother transition.  You can certainly
remove the two old names from the list if the new ones have arrived at
your site.

> Here's where I stopped gnus:
> Checking article 25608 in alt.nocem.misc for NoCeM...
> Good signature from user "AutoMoose1 (Automated Cancelmoose)".
> Verifying...

	If it was stuck verifying, you could always (setq
gnus-nocem-verifier nil).  This is also substantially faster, at the
cost that someone might forge a nocem posting.

> This is pretty ugly.  I have to set g-u-nocem to nil to see new news.
> It'd be neat if there was an explicit -batch interface to NoCeM,
> expecially since the gnus-daemon stuff has never worked for me in
> XEmacs.  I've been meaning to see why, never had the time.

	I've been thinking about a batch interface also, and might do it
since I'm thinking of rewriting some of the nocem code to support some
things in the soon to be official nocem BNF and prototype rfc.

> While I'm whining about stuff I'm not fixing/coding myself, I might as
> well mention that having the nocem stuff work off the scoring
> mechanism would be tres cool.  

	Yeah, that might work. :)  But I still haven't tried using
scoring at all, hmm, maybe some time when xemacs stabilizes a bit.

> In particular, it'd be neat if one could have an alist that let you
> specify the type of score entry you want generated for articles
> that're being eliminated by nocem.  A followup entry (I.e., low score
> on references) would be the most useful.  (Subject scores are less
> useful, given that a spammer could well choose a subject line that
> matches useful articles.)

	Hmm, that's a thought.  I've been leaning the other direction of
having automatic hiding of followups to nocem messages.  My NoCeM cache
varies from about 200k to 800k.  If the information in there was spread
out over several separate group score files, and also expanded to do
followups via current scoring mechanism, I could see it taking up some
pretty significant amounts of disk.  5-10M easily.  (or maybe not. :)

	There is no subject information available in the nocem control
messages, only message id.  So you'd have to score on that.

> An alist might be useful if we could come up with a reasonably concise
> description of a nocem-issuer that combined newsgroup context.
> Something that allowed statements like "issue followup scoredowns for
> nocems issued for articles in groups that match this regexp and issued
> by this person".  Maybe not very useful.  A single option allowing
> score type selection would be very useful, though.

	Yeah, this is might be a good idea. You'd also want to include
some other nocem issues such as the content type specifier.

-- 
David Moore <dmoore@ucsd.edu>       | Computer Systems Lab      __o
UCSD Dept. Computer Science - 0114  | Work: (619) 534-8604    _ \<,_
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114             | Fax:  (619) 534-1445   (_)/ (_)
<URL:http://oj.egbt.org/dmoore/>    | In a cloud bones of steel.