The Okopipi Project

At the risk of being flamed into oblivion...

This project was initiated months ago, shortly after the demise of Blue Frog - an interesting and unfortunate (though pivotal) project, that actually fought back and *made a difference*.

The spammers noticed, and they got pissed. I think that's progress. If anything, it demonstrated a few theories about fighting back. Some characterized it as "vigilante", others consider it completely legitimate.

Personally, I think it's legitimate. But that's another topic.

Since the time this project was initiated, there hasn't been one line of code written, no models, no project plan... and there doesn't seem to be sufficient interest (at least, as far as I can see here) in actually creating a product. At least, by those who are capable of writing code (which, unfortunately, I am not).

Though the original intent was good, I wonder why this board is still alive after all this time. ;-)

If there really is enough interest in getting this going, then a different approach is needed.

My question is: how? Slashdot, boards, somewhere to solicit participation?

Thoughts for the holidays...

I would REALLY like to see a replacement for the blue frog but have no coding abilities and little time. I think a number of people like myself, though, would be willing to contribute monetarily to the project. Would it be possible to set up a PayPal account administered by whoever is responsible on the steering committee with a cash prize to the person(s) with the first fully-functional client/system? People hate spam, and I think many would be willing to donate small amounts of money to create an incentive to get this moving. It would give those of us with no time and/or skills a way of helping and could provide some motivation to those here with the ability to make this work.

This may or may not have been mentioned before, but if the end product worked like this, I think we could have a winner.

The end product would allow everyone to download a toolbar for OE or gmail/yahoo. A database is built up on a number of distributed servers from feedback from sent from these end users who indicated when an item of email was spam.

After some time, the servers would analyse the results, and we would then have a list signatures of email messages that have been voted highly as those being spam messages. These would then be formalised and sent back to the client who could remove instances of those email of these messages.

To take things a step further, individual users, could be more highly respected by the system, and be assigned a greater weighting for example, if they were valuable users who submitted reports on a regular basis that were mainly in agreement with other users. These highly respected users weightings would be utilised from preventing the system being poisoned by the spammers.

When a new spam message hit the streets of course, the system would have no knowledge of it, however after a short period of time, some respected users would have submitted reports, and the system would be able to deal with them quickly, hopefully with this updated information helping the thousands of other users when they then open their client anytime after.

double post sorry.

Hello,
Although I haven't been active in the OKOPIPI project, it is good to know it is still alive. The struggle against spammers is a valued one for millions of users world wide. Although I don't have many technical skills in this respect, it is clear for me that we have to win this one... no choice. Urge people to join forces and get this project going. If there is anything in my low technical skills I can do, of course I will get involved.

Regards,
maqex