[dev] Feature request

[Rich Lafferty]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 02:14:05PM -0500, Dan Brown (danb35@earthlink.net) wrote:
> Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:
> > 
> > Quoting Dan Brown <danb35@earthlink.net>:
> > 
> > > 3.  Auto-submission of spam to spamcop.net.  I've noticed options for
> 	[snip]
>  
> > This strikes me as something not best put in the hands of normal users?
> 
> 	Why would this be?  Spamcop is designed, near as I can tell, for normal
> users as a tool to direct spam reports to the parties responsible for
> the spam.  To use it now, you pull up the message source and paste it
> into a form on spamcop.net, which works just fine, but it'd be cool to
> have it automated.

One other consideration -- this makes it really easy for IMP to break
in ways beyond our control.

One of the other projects I work on is infobot, an IRC 'bot which sits
in a channel learning things, and participating in the conversation
when asked based on what it learns. It also has a bunch of modules
that implement features like getting weather forecasts, divining on a
Magic 8-ball, translating text, and finding exchange rates.

In the past *week*, the last two have broken, because the Web sites
from which the data is retrieved redesigned things. This made it so
that a working function suddenly stopped working in every single copy
out there, even though their admins didn't change anything. It's easy
to fix, but suddenly everyone is forced to upgrade because of
something entirely beyond your control. 

I don't think we want to tie IMP into something that can break like
that.

(There's also the issue that SpamCop requires you to agree to its
terms of use before you submit anything, and its author writes: 
"I would prefer that you don't set up a posting-form from your
site. I want the users to see MY instructions and news updates
when they use SpamCop.")

   -Rich

-- 
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
 Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
   Concordia University, Montreal, QC                 (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich@alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------