Mailing List Archive

At 04:35 PM 3/9/2004, Kelson Vibber wrote:
>At 12:59 PM 3/9/2004, Jon Etkins wrote:
> >Your AWL scores have become positive, thus having the effect of
> BLACKlisting, but they're still in the autoWHITElist. Just use the
> --remove-addr-from-whitelist function.
>
>I've seen several posts with this sort of issue recently. Perhaps the
>name "auto whitelist" is confusing people? It might be worth coming up
>with another name that more accurately describes it.

>Someone recently described it as a score averaging system.


I'm one that commonly calls it a "score averaging system" when trying to
clarify people's understanding. It comes from the AwlWrongWay contribution
I made to the wiki/faq: http://wiki.spamassassin.org/w/AwlWrongWay, which
generaly explains the behavior of the AWL in a long-winded, but fairly easy
to understand way.

> Maybe auto-adjust system or something would be clearer.


Unfortunately this is a case where you're always going to confuse someone
unless the name is horrifically long.

You can name it based on how it really works, and call it "auto averager"
or "auto adjuster". However, then you'll have people wondering what it's
supposed to do. "what is this thing?" "why is it adjusting my scores??!"

Currently it's named after half of what it does "auto whitelist"... you
could rename it "auto white black list", but people will still be confused
thinking of it as "declaring spam as whitelisted for adding a negative score".

So you could name it "automatic white and blacklisting type system using
long term score averages, and no it's not a bug if it gives a negative
score to spam or positive score to nonspam, please read the FAQ".... but
that's too long to be practical.

I'd love to see a better name used.. but unfortunately, the AWL is a
slightly complicated beast that's hard to express in any short-worded way.

On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 13:45, Matt Kettler wrote:

> You can name it based on how it really works, and call it "auto averager"
> or "auto adjuster". However, then you'll have people wondering what it's
> supposed to do. "what is this thing?" "why is it adjusting my scores??!"

> I'd love to see a better name used.. but unfortunately, the AWL is a
> slightly complicated beast that's hard to express in any short-worded way.

How about "Historical Score Smoother"? Gets rid of those ugly spikes in
your scores...

It even has a cool acronym: "HISS".

--
John Hardin KA7OHZ
Internal Systems Administrator/Guru voice: (425) 672-1304
Apropos Retail Management Systems, Inc. fax: (425) 672-0192
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If you smash a computer to bits with a mallet, that appears to count
as encryption in the state of Nevada.
- CRYPTO-GRAM 12/2001
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Matt Kettler <mkettler@evi-inc.com> wrote:

> Currently it's named after half of what it does "auto
> whitelist"... you could rename it "auto white black list", but
> people will still be confused thinking of it as "declaring spam
> as whitelisted for adding a negative score".

It's true that the function is hard to give a short name to,
but using "whitelist" in the name makes it far worse than other
short-and-thus-incompletely-descriptive names. The name
naturally gives people the impression that AWL is somehow
connected with the whitelist options, but it's not related at
all. It's also confusing to have an "autowhitelist adjustment"
that can be positive. Besides, the adjustments it makes are in
most cases not large enough to be referred to as whitelisting
or blacklisting.

"Score averaging" or "historical adjustment" or any other
possibility that avoids "whitelist" would be preferable and
avoid a lot of confusion.

--
Keith C. Ivey <kcivey@cpcug.org>
Washington, DC

On Tuesday 09 March 2004 16:17, Keith C. Ivey wrote:
> "Score averaging" or "historical adjustment" or any other
> possibility that avoids "whitelist" would be preferable and
> avoid a lot of confusion.

"Reputation tracker"

--
_____________________________________
John Andersen