Beartooth SenectoFlatuloid posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 13:42:59 -0500:
> Maybe it can; I have never gotten my mind around the intricacies of rules, > scores, and other such things too fierce to mention. But I can plonk a > writer; can I do the opposite? > > Example: I look into dc.general from time to time, and invariably delete > 99 44/100 % of it unread. I could make a list, almost off the top of my > head, of half a dozen or so posters there, whitelist them all, delete > everything else in that group sight unseen by some automagic setting, and > miss maybe 0.01 - 0.1 % of what I normally read there. What you want is "watch", which effectively sets a 9999 score on anything matching what's watched. It is the exact opposite of "ignore", which is a -9999 score. So, score each author you want to watch, select the "watch" radio button under "score", set the group (or .* regular expression to match all groups), and don't forget to set the expiration -- the 30-day default is very seldom long enough for me, perhaps never expiring, or anyway, 90-365 days (a year), is what I normally use. You can then uncheck everything except for watched in the scores section of the filter menu, to ONLY view watched authors, and/or set the colors as desired in the preferences menu, so watched posts stand out in the overview (aka header) pane. Three additional variations on that: For some groups, rather than setting watched on everyone, I'll make use of the color coding possibilities. For my ISP groups, for instance, I set posts from newsmaster and the couple other ISP employees that post as watched (highest score color zone), set certain others, generally the handful of folks that run *ix but adding one other highly respected poster as well, to 5000, so they match the high score color, and set a third group, those who seem to consistently have useful comments, to 100, putting them in the medium score color group. On the bottom end, I set rules to delete "ignored" posts, and have a small group of killfiled folks "ignored", so their posts are deleted. (Note that here, I normally choose 90-270 days, 3-9 months, as expiry, since I'm a bit of an optimist and hope they mature a bit within that time, so they get another chance after that. If not, back in they go, for a longer period, 1-2 years, the second time. I'm not likely to set a longer expiry than that, except for spammers, because even if I think they are incurable, hopefully, within a couple years they will have moved elsewhere, and that keeps the score list from growing too long over time.) I set a rule for "negative/low" scores to automatically mark read, but not delete. This will apply to the relatively few folks who haven't caused offense enough to be killfiled entirely, but who don't normally say anything worthwhile enough in their posts to spend time on. The auto-mark-read means I don't normally see the posts, but if someone who I /do/ normally see posts a reply, I can toggle the view read posts thing and the view low scores thing and see the post being replied to. As I said, I don't use this zone very much, but it has proven useful on occasion. I typically set a shorter expiry here, 60-90 days, after which they return to zero-score land. The second variation I've already mentioned -- setting filters and rules based on the scores. In particular, if you normally view only unread posts, you'll want to delete (as I do with ignored) or at least mark read (as I do with negative scored) posts you won't normally see. If you don't, PAN will say there's still unread posts in a group, but you won't see them because you have set it not to view them. On the high end, you might want to set rules to automatically download the posts scored as "watched", and possibly high and medium scored posts as well (particularly if you use my color marking scheme rather than just marking everyone watched), since you'll almost certainly want to look at them anyway. Personally, I don't bother with this, since I've a decent speed connection and text posts anyway download almost instantly anyway, so it's not worth pre-downloading. However, this could be incredibly useful for those on dialup, or those using this technique on binary groups. Finally, a third variation, a bit more advanced, would be to expand the color coding idea to distinctively mark low and ignored color zone posts, instead of using them as they normally would be, to not view them. This would work best on groups with only a handful of different posters or zones you want to mark, and with either no one you want to truly ignore, or where you want to ignore EVERYONE not scored either up or down, into one of the categories. You could then setup a rule such that ONLY zero-scored posts would be deleted or marked read, with BOTH above zero and below zero scoring posts retained. This would give you the two additional below-zero score groups (ignored and low) as distinctive color marking groups, while if setup correctly, would delete or mark read (according to the action chosen on the rule you setup) any post NOT specifically assigned a positive or negative score. Given the ability to set the groups to which rules apply, one could even use different schemes for different groups, such that for most groups, ignored posts are deleted and low/negative scoring posts are marked read, but for a couple special groups, only the unscored posts (those still scored zero) would be deleted or marked read, with others categorized by color according to their score. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
