[Pan-users] Re: Feature request

[Duncan]

Derek Turner <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 14 Dec 2008
18:17:23 +0000:

> I'd like an 'ignore all threads started by this author (and mark read)'
> can it be done or would this be a new feature? It's one thing ignoring
> the group's resident troll but people /will/ keep replying to them.
> Also, ignored threads should be marked read by default, if I'm ignoring
> a thread I don't want  it counting in my unread messages total.

The way it works, you can ignore an author (which puts an =-9999 entry in 
the scorefile for that author), and once you see a thread, you can mark 
that thread ignored (putting an =-9999 entry in the scorefile for 
messages with the message-id of the original post in the references 
header).

You can't, however, ignore a thread without first seeing at least one 
post from it, because pan has no way of knowing what message-id to score 
against.  It doesn't actually think about what it scores and can't put 
two and two together, as they say.  It can only score on something in the 
scorefile that directly matches something in the message.

In theory, it would be possible, but I have a very strong feeling Charles 
will mark it as target "bluesky", which pretty much means, "Yes, it'd be 
nice, someday... but don't count on it any year soon... unless you 
volunteer to code it, that is."  (Charles does take patches!)  Pan simply 
has no structure for implementing logic that indirect, so it would be 
from scratch, and would need well tested as such entirely new code is 
often quite buggy.

As for marking read by default, old-pan had a way to do that called 
rules.  However, it was quite complex to setup and we got a lot of 
requests for help with it.  Charles decided it was too complex to 
implement that way in new-pan, and so far, it (or the related auto-delete 
based on score and auto-download based on score) have yet to be 
implemented in new-pan, tho the feature is planned.  Take a look at the 
archives if you're interested in what we've discussed for the UI, 
however.  I posted a message perhaps a week ago with some detailed info 
in that regard.

However, Charles tends to work on pan in spurts.  When he released the  
rewrite into C++ (starting with 0.90, now at 0.133, and commonly referred 
to as new-pan), he had nearly weekly betas for about 16 months.  However, 
after that he was understandably rather burnt out, and he took a break.  
0.132 was the last of that spurt, release on Aug. 1, 2007.  Since then 
there has been very little work done, altho he did release 0.133 exactly 
a year later, Aug. 1, this year, rolling up a bunch of patches that had 
been submitted to bugzilla to let pan compile with updated gcc and glibc 
and fix a security vulnerability in 0.132.  But he has done little except 
that bare minimum update in over a year now.  When he'll get back to 
actually writing new code, including hopefully the auto-action based on 
score stuff, nobody knows.  =:^(  Of course, again, if you have the 
coding skills, Charles does encourage patches. =:^)

-- 
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