From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2002-08-15T20:39:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Weekly News

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 04:55:45PM +0900, Holden Glova wrote:
> I wonder how voting would work - would people actually be bothered to use it? 
> Interesting idea Mauricio.

I think I have a better one:
	include the vote in the message itself!

It would work that way:
you register yourself somehow (web form, email, whatever), and you can
get up to N vote ids per week. It's up to you to decide how to spend
them in the messages you post. If you find an interesting thread AND
have something to say about it, you include the vote id number in your
message. Note you're voting the thread, not your message :-)

This way two interesting things will happen:
 * longer threads are more likely to receive a high number of votes
 * however, long "how do I?" questions not that interesting will not get
   automatically selected.

It's still us who decide what is worth including in the RWN, not a
"stupid rule" :)

As for the implementation:
I hope we can assume nobody will try to crack this, so we don't really
have to implement tight security measures.

It could go as follows:
 to register, send a message to some mailbot, in which you basically claim
 your email address is <xxx@yyy>. The request is rejected if you have
 never participated in the mailing list. Otherwise, a login/password
 pair is sent to the address you claimed. If you reply, the system will
 register you as a valid user.

 Then, either setup a web page somewhere where given the id
 and pw a registered user can get its N voting tokens for this
 week/month/whatever or send it by email.

 Counting: the script is run automatically every week. It knows the
 valid vote ids for that week (more on this below) and only accepts
 these. A selection of the most voted threads is posted to the guy
 in charge of RWN.

As for the votes:
 something like ##nickname:md5_hash## included in the message.

Generating the IDs:

require "md5"

code_string = "ruby rules!"     # this is only known by the maintainer 
				# of the script
username = gets
username.chop!

t = Time.now
interval = 7 ## issue new vote ids each interval days
basestr = "#{code_string}-#{t.month}/#{(t.day/interval).floor}/#{t.year}" +
		"-#{username}"
puts "Today is " + t.to_s
puts "Using base string: #{basestr}"
numtokens = 3 # num of allowed votes per interval
(1..numtokens).each do |i|
	str = basestr + sprintf("%2d", i)
	theid = "###{username}:#{MD5.hexdigest str}##"
	puts "Generated token: #{theid}"
end

Output:
batsman
Today is Thu Aug 15 13:30:06 CEST 2002
Using base string: ruby rules!-8/2/2002-batsman
Generated token: ##batsman:3d473f1bc6038310932db2014ea3a06c##
Generated token: ##batsman:4a39720c0722c78df9ef4f0001cda9a6##
Generated token: ##batsman:d9af96f7bddf441f295cbd326e010271##

The way the hash is generated, only the maintainer of the script can
verify it is valid and it was indeed generated by his/her script.
Plus the votes are only valid for a limited time period. And you get a
limited number of them.

We can give matz "super voting powers" (his votes count triple or
whatever) :-) We could ballot who has super voting powers. If Ruby ever
takes over the world we could add another layer, and another, and... X-D

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