I like Usenet, and I love Gnus, the news and mail client for emacs and xemacs. One of the nicest features of Gnus is the scoring features, a more sophisticated replacement for killfiles.
Now, here's the problem: Lots of folks on Usenet are sloppy and lazy writers, relying on stupid smiley faces in place of actual humor and using the same hackneyed phrases so often that acronyms are sufficient. Very annoying.
So, I decided to write an emacs-lisp function to automatically scan the body of each article I read. If emoticons, bad acronyms, repeated exclamation points, etc. are found, then the function lowers the score of that author in the global score file. Spiteful? Sure. Petty? No doubt. But oddly satisfying. And, over time, the worst abusers of Usenet "style" (in the loose sense) will be purged from my client before I ever see their dreck.
How churlish is that? Don't answer! There's more! Now, when the offensive word is found in an article, the face of that word is changed to black-on-black, like this. This adds a whole new dimension to this juvenile functionality. Namely, you can now pretend to be another faceless censor working to oppress the down-trodden in an oppressive dictatorship. Whee!
Of course, this may make certain articles nearly unreadable, but that's a small price to pay for the illusion of retribution against bad writing, no? Well, maybe not, but this innovative feature is easily omitted. See the comments in the source file.
Of course, these functions were born out of boredom more than need (or even desire). I wanted to see how difficult it was to add this functionality. I'm not much of a Lisp programmer, so I'm sure that these functions can be improved, but I offer them here for whoever wishes them. Feel free to do whatever you want with them, but please include credit to me in any derivative work you distribute.