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First off, the sandboxes idea greatly increases the number of people who can check rules into SVN. Secondly, the barriers to entry for getting a sandboxes account are much lower.

Rule Promotion

Getting rules from the sandbox, into the distribution:

• each user gets their own sandbox as discussed on RulesProjMoreInput
• checked-in rules in the sandboxes are mass-checked in the nightly mass-checks
• to migrate a rule from "sandbox" (dev) to "core" (production) ruleset uses C-T-R; ie. votes are not required in advance
• also C-T-R to migrate from "sandbox" to "extra" ruleset
  

Rules that get promoted from a "sandbox" to "core" should pass the following criteria:

• pass "--lint"!
• S/O ratio of 0.95 or greater (or 0.05 or less for nice rules)
• > 0.25% of target type hit (e.g. spam for non-nice rules)
• < 1.00% of non-target type hit (e.g. ham for non-nice rules)
  

We can automate those criteria pretty easily. We can also vote for rules that don't pass those criteria, but we think should be put into core for some reason.

Future criteria:

• not too slow TODO: need an automated way to measure that
• TODO: criteria for overlap with existing rules? see 'overlap criteria' below.
  

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Getting There From Here

If we're going to start pulling rules from sandboxes into core/ in the above fashion, but we leave the current ruleset intact in the core as well, things will get messy.

I propose we move the current core ruleset into a sandbox, called 'rules/sandbox/legacy/'. The good rules that pass the above selection criteria, get promoted as any other rules from other sandboxes do, into the new 'core/'; the old, stale rules (of which we have a few), will not get back into core.

The 'extra/' Set

A ruleset in the "extra" set would have different criteria; e.g.

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