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joke filter

 I bet you haven't seen this one - it's hilarious.
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I'm always getting email from people who've just received an hilarious email, which they forward on to me thinking it's the first time I've seen it.

I like a joke as much as the next person, and hence have probably seen it before. Thus I propose a global joke database, which my "joke filter" can use.

1) An email comes to the joke filter, if it's new, it get's added to the joke database, and gets a joke ID

2) if I've been sent it before, the email gets bounced back to the sender

3) if I've not been sent it before, it slips through the filter

The filter's very clever and uses AI and stuff to determine whether two jokes are the same.

—neilp, Sep 17 2003

Mimesweeper http://www.mimesweeper.com/
Clearswift's mimesweeper does server side filtering [neilp, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

[link]






       actually, thinking about it, this would work just as well for spam, e.g. you'd only ever receive one email from a DOCTOR URANGO PETERRAMI who has $10,000,000 in a secret bank account which he needs to transfer to your account to smuggle out of the country
—neilp, Sep 17 2003
   

       i was just going to annotate about the anti-spam possibilities. This idea has real potential, presuming that the dbase it searches cannot be tampered with.   

       I also presume that the joke_id (or spam_id) of gags you've already been read would be stored as a cookie, or similar local based file?
—jonthegeologist, Sep 17 2003
   

       I already have a spam filter, but there's a fine balance between filtering out the spam crap and not filtering out the crap from friends which I might like to read to pass the time on a dull day in the lab. I never seem to be able to get the balance right. I would imagine that a joke filter would be the same and I'd probably miss out on the latest mirth-making-missal but still get the one about the funeral of the guy who invented the Hokey Cokey.
—hazel, Sep 17 2003
   

       [jtg] - this list would be stored on the server ! as otherwise when you got a new PC / logged in from somewhere else etc. you'd just go through the whole process again.
—neilp, Sep 17 2003
   

       [hazel] - this would give us precisely what we want, no more hokey bloody cokey and more amusing original gags.
—neilp, Sep 17 2003
   

       Some anti-spam tools like Cloudmark's SpamNet (based on the open source Vipul's Razor) work almost just like this. Spams are identified by a signature process, and the signatures are stored in a central database. As your mail comes in, the tool checks the mail against the signatures and blocks it based on it. New signatures are added when the users of the product see a spam get through and mark it as spam.   

       What you would need to add is your step (3) which allows the joke through the first time, and then filters it from then on.
—krelnik, Sep 17 2003
   

       [krelnik] - in my experience spamnet doesn't do much to work out whether an email is similar, it just seems to do identical matches.. would be good though.

Also, I'd really want this done server side, like mimesweeper does, rather than client side which is slow, boring and seems hit and miss.
—neilp, Sep 17 2003
   

       "hey, remember joke number 27?"...(dead silence)   

       "Why isn't anyone laughing?"   

       "Because you have lousy delivery and no sense of timing..."   

       [neilp] - Where do I get one of those mimesweepers?
—Don Quixote, Sep 17 2003
   

       [DQ] - see link
—neilp, Sep 18 2003
   

       [DQ] I've seen one of those mimesweepers being used by the police in covent garden. It's pretty good. Not only does it clear up any mimes that happen to be congregated (do you have a problem with flocking mimes in your town?), but also weeds out any mime artists who are posing as members of the general public.
—goff, Sep 18 2003
   

       <aside>[goff] great idea, the more mimesweepers in covent garden the better, they infuriate me, every single day, normally at lunch but sometimes on the way home too (they annoy me whenever they're there, it's not that I'm being idiosyncratic)</aside>
—neilp, Sep 18 2003
   
      
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