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Hi All, Several people have posted lately commenting on the fact that George's messages often contain pearls of wisdom gleaned from hard won experience, but frequently contain diatribes filled with scatalogical references and little or no information that furthers their knowledge of diving. If you are like I am you have a limited amount of time to read email and would like an automated way of separating the wheat from the chaff so that you don't spend a lot of time manually sorting the messages out by reading through them all. A simple kill file will prevent all of George's mail from getting through, but that also eliminates all the useful info. I pondered the problem for awhile and analyzed some of George's messages and came up with an algorithm to do the job in an automated fashion. The general idea is to scan the message looking for key phrases. These phrases fall into four basic categories. These are: Denigration Homophobic Hot Button General The Hot Button phrases get the most points because they are most likely to get George's blood pressure up and set off a tirade. Create a file on your system for each category and put the known phrases into the proper file. So far I have: DENIGRATION: bone smuggler stroke suck my dick SMD shut the fuck up stfu dumb fuck HOMOPHOBIC: anus lapper transformer HOT BUTTON: butt mount light Genesis tanks square battery case prismatic battery case Dacor Scooter magnetic switch breathe the short hose GENERAL: sushi Lucys knee pads pet the pony Your filter program simply scans the mail message for the phrases in each category and assigns a point value to each. If the points racked up by a message goes over a preset value it is put in a hold file for later review. Sentences with more than one phrase in them get extra points. As George comes up with new phrases or as you tire of reading the same old flames every time some new guy comes on the list and posts a message like: "I'm having some problems butt mounting my light and was wondering if..." Add the appropriate phrase to the proper file and you won't be bothered with it any more. At first I broke each phrase down into nouns and adjectives but after further thought I decided that it didn't really matter whether you were an "anus lapping bone smuggler" or a "bone smuggling anus lapper". If the root form of each phrase is stored in the files your pattern matching software uses, you can catch either form. For example "anus lapp" will match either the noun phrase "anus lapper" or the adjective phrase "anus lapping". One problem I had was with phrases having double meanings. Some examples are: butt mounter weenie hoover short hose A "butt mounter" could go in the Hot Button file as one who butt mounts lights, or it could go in the Homophobic file as one who mounts butts. Similarly a "weenie hoover" could be simple Denigration as one who sucks a lot of air on weenie dives, or in the Homophobic file as one who sucks weenies. Also a "short hose" could be someone who either breathes the short hose or someone with a short penis. It is difficult for an automated program to determine which meaning these phrases have, but in these three cases it didn't really matter because either definition was equally bad. Just be sure and put each phrase in only one category so it won't be double counted. Since I'm in a UNIX environment I used a simple shell file with awk and sed to do the pattern matching but you could use your favorite programming language or database to do the job or even macros in a word processor using its "find" command. I'm able to read through techdiver mail much more quickly now, and if it appears I have missed a message of substance I can retrieve it from the hold file for review. By tuning the point values you set for each phrase you can filter out the messages that annoy you 90% of the time while rarely missing a good one. If I missed any good phrases please post them to the list. Please direct flames and hate mail to /dev/null. Hope this helps. Rick
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