A kill file (also killfile, bozo bin or twit list) is a file used by some
Usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
reading programs to discard articles matching some unwanted patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Adding a person or subject to one's kill file means that person or topic will be ignored by one's
newsreader in the future. By extension, the term may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media.
Kill files were first implemented in
Larry Wall
Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language.
Personal life
Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at ...
's
rn. Sometimes more than one kill file will be used. Some
newsreader programs also allow the user to specify a time period to keep an author in the kill file.
Web-based forums, including at least some web-based Usenet portals, often have a similar but usually simpler feature called an ''ignore list'', which hides any posts by a specific user, though typically without the ability to ignore posts for reasons other than the username of origin.
More advanced newsreader software like
Gnus
Gnus (), or Gnus Network User Services, is a message reader which is part of GNU Emacs. It supports reading and composing both e-mail and news and can also act as an RSS reader, web processor, and directory browser for both local and remote file ...
sometimes provides a more sophisticated form of filter known as scoring, where score files are maintained which use
fuzzy logic
Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and complet ...
to apply arbitrarily complex overlapping sets of rules to score articles up or down, with articles being properly killed (ignored by the newsreader) only when their weighted score drops below a user-defined threshold. For example, articles might be score killed
iff
In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false.
The connective is bicondi ...
they violate too many low-weighted stylistic rules (e.g. containing too many
capital letter
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
s or too little punctuation, implying an annoying reading experience), or only one or two highly-weighted rules (such as the
body containing objectionable keywords or the origin being a known source of
spam).
History
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelle (; August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960 ...
wrote in 1986 of his wish for improvements to an
offline reader for the
Byte Information Exchange online service: "What I really need, though, is a program that will ... sort through the messages, assigning some to a priority file and others to the bit bucket depending on subject matter and origin".
Media
In
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, hi ...
's novel ''
Idoru'', the virtual community Hak Nam is built around an "inverted killfile" and is modeled on
Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned and densely populated ''de jure'' Imperial Chinese enclave within the boundaries of Kowloon City, British Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the walled city became an enclave after the New ...
.
See also
*
Circular File
*
Email filtering
Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The term can apply to the intervention of human intelligence, but most often refers to the automatic processing of messages at an SMTP server, possibly appl ...
*
Shadow banning
*
Usenet Death Penalty
On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty (the state-sa ...
References
External links
Kill fileentry in the
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANE ...
Kill file definitionentry at NewsDemon.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kill File
Usenet