On Thursday, September 2, 2004, 10:28:08 AM, Ryan Thompson wrote:
I like something along the lines of the "unconfirmed" (or "uc") idea. What if *all* as-yet-unverified SURBL submissions (for ws, and anybody else who wants to play with us) went to "uc", and we kept score of the number of submissions (perhaps modified by some assigned trust multiplier for the "coolness" or historical accuracy of a particular submitter). Once a domain reaches a certain score, it's added (probably manually, at first) to ws. Regular whitelisting mechanisms could still apply for both lists.
Concern: this slows down inclusion of domains into ws. I don't think it has to. The SURBL folks re-check submitted domains anyway. Here's what I see happening with submissions:
Something like this happened with BigEvil and MidEvil. MidEvil was Paul Barbeau's attempt to get new entries quicker than Chris could into BigEvil. They ran as two separate but related rulesets for quite a while.
Eventually when Chris had time, he would merge the MidEvil rules in batches into BigEvil. Chris, did you end up re-checking most of Paul's work? If so that arguably made for more work, not less.
I can't really speak to the internals of that process other than to note that it eventually gave way to be.surbl.org, then ws.surbl.org.
We could come up with various levels of automation for this, but, at first, all three of these things could be done manually without very much extra work, compared to what we're doing now, as far as I know.
Any lists that are not hand-checked will be full of errors. Automation should only be a first pass. The final pass must always be human checked.
Even then, human categorizers make mistakes. A greylist would increase those mistakes by having mushy criteria for inclusion and therefore encourage sloppy or incomplete work.
Yes, sometimes making a black or white decision is difficult, but it needs to be done in order to gain maximum downstream utility, IMO.
Jeff C.