[Pan-users] Re: 0.129 - a few minor issues

[Jim Henderson]

On Fri, 11 May 2007 04:22:50 +0000, Duncan wrote:

>> 1.  Sometimes when I pull down new messages, I see the new message
>> header count in the newsgroup list, and if I go through all of the
>> messages that are unread, Pan tells me that there is still an unread
>> message.  I've assigned a hotkey to the "read/unread" item in the
>> header view menu, and if I show all messages and then immediately show
>> the unread messages, the remaining unread messages show up.  There
>> doesn't seem to be a pattern to this behaviour, at least not that I can
>> see.
> 
> Someone else with a hotkey on read/unread. =8^)
> 
> I don't see this particular bug, however.  The unread count seems
> accurate to me (tho I tend to go months without doing binaries at all,
> and it's been exactly that, and text groups don't have the raw post
> quantity so may not trigger the issue).

I rarely do binaries, and I see it frequently - even in text-only groups 
with a low traffic rate.  For instance, I monitor a private server's 
control.cancel group, and usually there's only a handful of messages in 
there, but I almost never see the new messages without doing the read/
unread thing.

>> 3.  It would also be nice if the group list could be sorted by news
>> server - I'm still getting used to having all the groups in one list,
>> but having groups from one news server interspersed with groups from
>> another news server causes me to have to shift gears more often than I
>> otherwise would.
> 
> This won't work particularly well, since most groups will be on most
> servers.  

Maybe for you, but not for me.  I use forums.novell.com, news.povray.org, 
news.vmware.com, and a couple others - all special-purpose servers with 
their own distinct sets of newsgroups.

> Something that /would/ work would be user categorization, the
> ability to have multiple user labeled categories under subscribed groups
> into which users could separate their groups.  However, that's almost
> certainly a post-1.0 feature (but a much requested one which shouldn't
> be an extreme amount of work, so it should eventually appear).

Cool, that would work fine for me as well, and ultimately I think is 
probably the better solution - I'm all in favor of that kind of 
flexibility.

> Meanwhile, something you CAN do is create multiple pan instances, each
> with its own settings.  Here, I have a text instance, a binary instance,
> and a test instance, but one could arrange it however they wanted.

Yes, that *could* work, but in terms of operational efficiency, obviously 
this is less than optimal.  This is functionality I use from old pan with 
the different servers from the menu - I'm actually liking the unified 
view the more I use it (it's saving me keystrokes, not a bad thing at 
all), but because all the servers I use hold different groups, I have, 
for example, irtc.* (from povray's news server) near the top but the 
povray.* groups appear after my novell.* groups.  This means that 
mentally I have to switch from hobby to work and back to hobby when I'm 
going through the groups.

>> 4.  I like how the posting profile is determined automatically most of
>> the time - it would be nice, though, if a posting profile could be used
>> on multiple servers - I use the same name and fake e-mail address on
>> two servers, and have two profiles set up for that purpose now.  Not a
>> big deal now that it's set up, but it took a minute to figure out why I
>> was receiving an error while trying to post.  Maybe the posting server
>> could be set to use the server hosting the group (or a primary server
>> hosting the group if you're subscribed to multiple servers holding the
>> same group) with the posting profile selection being able to override
>> what Pan figures out on its own.
> 
> Putting the posting server to use in the posting profile was a bit of a
> hack.  I suggested it and Charles used it as no one had a better
> suggestion.  Before that, pan would post using the first configured
> server that happened to carry a group, which often wasn't the desired
> behavior at all, but hadn't been configurable.  When the discussion came
> up as to where exactly to put the posting server setting, such that it
> could be set for each group separately, I suggested putting it in the
> posting profile, as it seemed logical to me that it would be configured
> in the same place as all the other posting preferences, and that one
> could simply choose one of possibly several posting profiles for a group
> and set everything about posting, handle/email, sig, custom headers, and
> server to use, all at once.  However, not everybody seems to think it's
> as intuitive a place for it as it seems to me as others have had
> comments similar to yours, and Charles said he wasn't entirely happy
> with it either.  Only nobody else could come up with anything better, so
> that's what was used.  If you believe you have a better idea, by all
> means, let's discuss it.   I can't say I'll like it better personally as
> this one seems perfectly intuitive to me, but as I said, it's not always
> so for others, so maybe there's something better only nobody has figured
> it out yet. =8^)

Now that I've played with it a bit more, it seems to be slightly broken - 
I added a second posting profile for one of the servers for a specific 
group where I wanted a - shall we say - more controversial sig line - and 
now it seems to pick that for all my gmane groups as well unless I 
explicitly tell it which profile to use.  I'm guessing the duplicate 
server name is throwing it off.

>> 5.  It would be helpful if the scores for a thread were calculated and
>> that value displayed when a thread is not expanded.
> 
> I use expanded by default, so wouldn't find this of much use here, but
> I'm sure many would.

I also noticed that if you view "watched" (with the button), it shows 
just the messages that are watched rather than the thread - because of 
the way I work, this is less useful, because I need to be able to see the 
whole thread.

Jim