[Spambayes] Web UI features request: multi-select on the Reviewpage

[Robert Neuschul]

Tony

> In what way is the UI not w3c compliant in terms of forms?  (There are
> lots of things that do need to be fixed for it to be generally
> compliant).

I've already explained it, but I'll try again: multi-select is an 
attribute of a selection. It is used where one or more items are to have 
certain operations carried out upon them. 
In terms of the Spambayes UI that would mean being able to place one's 
mouse on a listed item of mail, hold down the Ctrl Key and click on 
another - and another - and repeat until all required items had been 
selected, and then click in one of the ham/spam/defer checkboxes to 
automatically change *all* the selected [highlighted] items.
Similar operations should be possible using Shift-click.


> Or to change them all (to defer, for example), and individually alter
> any that you wish to, one at a time.

Try doing that when there's 500 items to alter from a list of 1000, and 
you have to make 500 individual mouse clicks. You'll have tendonitis by 
the end of the process. It's a poor workaround that doesn't actually 
address the issue.
 
> The standard operation of [Shift-]Ctrl-Click is to select an individual
> item for later attention.  It would make no sense, as far as I can see,
> to individually select messages so that you can then click on 'Spam'
> (for example), when you could just click on the spam button for each
> one.  If you are ctrl-clicking on 10 messages, for example, you then
> have 11 clicks (one for each message, and one for the classification).
> With the current method, you have 10 clicks.

In general I agree: ctrl-click isn't always good. But shift-click *is* 
good, and shift-click plus ctrl-click are powerful tools: in any event, 
not supporting these two sets of keystrokes renders the form non-compliant 
both with regard to W3C and to Windows programming guidelines, and also 
means that Spambayes will not be amenable to use by browser support 
applications designed to assist disabled/handicapped people, since it 
breaks the coding guidelines.

> What standards are you reading?  This, right?

I need to dig out the ref: last time I looked at it was more than 12 
months ago, but that doesn't sound like the correct one.

> I'm afraid that your simpler English doesn't make sense.  Do you mean
> "presents cached messages", or "presents incoming and cached messages",
> perhaps?

Yup

> 1.  If "several dozens" of messages are being incorrectly classified
> (out of "several hundred"), then spambayes is not working well for you,
> and you either need to do more training, or fix something that's not
> correctly set.

Spambayes is working *very* well in the most part: the accuracy is well 
above 90% in most cases. However our definition of what constitutes 
legitimate mail is abnormal as a result of the kind of work we do and the 
types of mail we legitimately receive often gets classified as spam. As a 
result many items need to be reclassified in order to train Spambayes to 
our requirements. On average that's currently around 20-25 items per day 
in a mailbag that easily exceeds 500 items per day. As we've proceeded to 
train it, that failure rate is dropping.

> 2.  You have to signify somehow which messages need to have their
> classification changed.  With a control-click, you will have to click
> each one individually.  A shift-click might work, but would require
> incorrectly classified messages to be sequential (in sequences of four
> at a minimum, for any effort to be saved).

Ironically, this often seems to be the case: items are frequently 
sequential.

> I'm sorry, but I still don't see what the improvement you are asking for
> is (which obviously means that I can't add it).  Can you perhaps point
> me to an example form somewhere that demonstrates the feature you are
> asking for?  Or a specific part of the w3c recommendation that the form
> is not complying with?

Will revert shortly.

Robert.