Pseudo-moderating Usenet with cancel2nocem

[A. Caspis]

Dear NoCeM developers,

I am trying to revive your original idea of pseudo-moderating
Usenet with NoCeM.

To bootstrap the practice, I allows users to downmod articles
by simply invoking the "cancel" function of their unmodified
newsreader; this can typically be done with just one keypress.
A NNTP proxy translates these cancels into NoCeM notices and
posts them in batches. The same proxy also applies selected
NoCeM filtering feeds on incoming articles, of course.

Third-party cancels currently require a trick which is known
to work at least with Thunderbird. In the long term the NNTP
CANCELCHK extension may be used instead. Alternatively, users
can post specially-formatted messages which the proxy will
recognize and translate into NoCeM notices as well.

Details and source code are available here:
http://cancel2nocem.free.fr/english.html

Comments are welcome, especially on the following issues:

- Why has this idea failed to gain momentum in the past ?

- In which groups should we post NoCeM notices from thousands
(if this becomes popular) of volunteer pseudo-moderators ?

- How do we maintain a registry of thousands of feeds ?

- How do users decide which feeds to trust ?

- Will the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio be worth
the additional NNTP traffic ?

AC