A kill file (also killfile, bozo bin or twit list) is a
file that stores
text matching patterns that are used in some
Usenet
Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
reading programs to filter out (ignore) articles by subject, author, or other header information. Adding a pattern to a kill file results in matching articles being ignored by the
person
A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...
using the
newsreader. By extension, the term may describe a decision to ignore an author or topic.
A kill file feature was first implemented in
Larry Wall
Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer, linguist, and author known for creating the Perl programming language and the patch tool.
Early life and education
Wall grew up in Los Angeles and Bremerton, Wash ...
's
rn.
Variations
Some newsreaders allow the user to specify a time period to keep an author in the kill file.
An ignore list is a similar yet simpler feature found in some
web-based
A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...
forums, including some web-based Usenet portals, which filters out posts by author only.
Scoring is a more advanced feature found in some newsreaders, including
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 ...
. The newsreader uses
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 completely ...
to apply arbitrarily complex overlapping rules, stored in score files, to score articles. An article is ignored when its score is below a user-defined threshold. For example, articles might score as ignored (killed) if it violates 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 (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
s or too little punctuation, implying an annoying reading experience), or only one or two highly-weighted rules (such as the
body
Body may refer to:
In science
* Physical body, an object in physics that represents a large amount, has mass or takes up space
* Body (biology), the physical material of an organism
* Body plan, the physical features shared by a group of anim ...
containing objectionable keywords or the origin being a known source of
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
).
History
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelle (; August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American scientist in the area of operations research and ergonomics, human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. ...
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, his ear ...
'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 extremely densely populated and largely lawless enclave of China within the boundaries of Kowloon City of former British Hong Kong. Built as an imperial Chinese Fortification, military fort, the walled city beca ...
.
See also
*
*
*
*
*
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 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...
Kill file definitionentry at NewsDemon.com
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Usenet