Rich Kulawiec wrote:
I don't think this is elitist, I think it's a matter of recognizing that
the spam/not-spam classification process requires expertise *vastly* in
excess of that possessed by almost all users. This is not their "fault"
per se because it's not a fault: it's simply a lack of area-specific
experience and knowledge.
You seem to be seeing it only as "a single ordinary user making
site-wide decisions on what to block" versus "totally ignoring what the
users say" choice.
If that binary choice was the only choice, I'd agree with you. I have
enough horror stories of goofs in that regard. Hell, I have enough
horror stories when the alleged expert (me) screws up good.
But that is _not_ the choice. Acting as if it is is at least mistaken.
TiS buttons aren't implemented that way.
_Nobody_ is talking about individual ordinary users making site-wide
decisions of what to block. That requires very high levels of expertise
as you say. But there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with
taking note of what those individual users are saying, and using it in a
statistical fashion to guide your filtering. That is how TiS buttons
are used in infrastructures large enough to bother with them. It is,
after all, how Spamcop was originally implemented, and it's still part
of their decisioning process albeit less than it used to be.
There are non-user-driven DNSBLs less useful than Spamcop ;-)
If we were to specify/standardize/or even (gasp) implement a common TiS
strategy/implementation that actually drives filters, the crucial part
is coming up with a "filter decisioning" strategy that the admins can
tune, and has reasonable defaults.
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