[duckmysick]

I'll bite. How would you solve the following with the 20th century software without any API or services:

- regex rules are updated frequently (let's say weekly)

- the updates are available to hundreds if not thousands of users in different locations

- all of them have the latest ruleset

- all of them capable of sending feedback regarding how useful and correct the suggestions are

- said feedback is analyzed regularly and used to refine the ruleset

[jamessb]

I think the "20th century" solution to letting many users in different locations run regexes would probably have been to write a cgi-bin script in Perl, and have users paste text into a box on an HTML form.

The results page generated by the script could have checkboxes to mark each suggestion as useful/not-useful/incorrect and a submit button, with this feedback saved in MySQL.

(I'm not sure whether this qualifies as "without ... services")