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 files ...

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 completely ...

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 bicon ...

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 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 anima ...

containing objectionable keywords or the origin being a known source of

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

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 1960s ...

wrote in 1986 of his wish for improvements to an

offline reader An offline reader (sometimes called an offline browser or offline navigator) is computer software that downloads e-mail, newsgroup posts or web pages, making them available when the computer is offline: not connected to a server. Offline readers ...

for the

Byte Information Exchange BYTE Information eXchange (BIX) was an online service created by ''BYTE''. History ''BYTE'' in the October 1984 issue announced BYTEnet, "a project in computer conferencing", with 200 beta testers who received free service during the "experiment". ...

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

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 ...

's novel ''

Idoru ''Idoru'' is the second book in William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. ''Idoru'' is a science-fiction novel set in a postmodern, dystopian, cyberpunk future. One of the main characters, Colin Laney, has a talent for identifying nodal points, analogou ...

'', 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 Ter ...

References

External links

Kill file
entry 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 ARPANET A ...

Kill file definition
entry at NewsDemon.com {{DEFAULTSORT:Kill File Usenet

History

Media

See also

References

External links