[Pan-users] Re: scoring tweak?

[Duncan]

Tom Daly <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 25 Feb 2008
19:24:59 -0400:

> Pan 0.132 / Kubuntu 7.10 / KDE 3.5.9
> 
> I have several (many?) frequent posters to various newsgroups scored as
> "Ignore Author > Score to -9999 > Forever"
> 
> The scoring filter is working fine, in that I never see posts from these
> people, but they appear to be entered as 'ghost-posters'  ie I can read
> all the postings and still have the Group list telling me there are X
> unread posts.  I assume these are from those whom I have blocked??  Is
> there something I can do in the Scoring to make posts from blocked
> senders not even show up as invisible unread postings?

You assume correctly.  Unfortunately, there's nothing to be done about it 
currently, except manually -- it's possible to check the match ignored 
scores box, sort by score unthreaded if you've other posts you want to 
save as unread, select the ignored posts and mark-read.  That eliminates 
the unread "ignored" messages, but it's manual.

In old pan there was a rules mechanism that enabled this sort of thing 
(and auto-downloading for those that wanted it) to be done automatically, 
but the implementation was "unintuitive" and it hasn't been reimplemented 
in the rewrite.  There has been heavy requests and a lot of discussion on 
it, and the current idea is to implement the GUI side as a set of three 
options with minimum/maximum score settings, conceptually similar to the 
following:

Auto:
        delete          posts scored lower than         <dropdown>

        mark-read       posts scored lower than         <dropdown>

        download        posts scored higher than        <dropdown>

The dropdown would then have the same scoring zone choices as the score 
color options, ignored (<=-9999), low/negative (<zero), normal/zero, 
medium (1-4999), high (5000-9998), watched (>=9999).  There'd either be a 
further dropdown choice of disabled, or a checkbox for each that would 
disable the dropdown, depending on final implementation.

The debate has been on whether to enable these options at a reasonable 
level (delete ignored, mark-read low/negative, download watched) by 
default, thus changing the active default when the feature is introduced, 
or disable them unless the user specifically activates them, thus keeping 
the current situation by default but being less intuitively reasonable 
"out of the box".

However, this wasn't a feature that made it into the year-plus of 
intensive weekly betas after the introduction of the rewrite.  The 
original intention was to go to 1.0 stable relatively quickly, and save 
this for 1.1.x, but it didn't happen that way.  Personally, I'd like /
some/ sort of way to control this automatically to come back before a 
publicly announced 1.0 stable, thus keeping it from being a regression 
from the pre-rewrite <0.15 versions of some years ago, but I'm not the 
one doing the developing, and as they say, he who codes, decides.

If you have coding skills, Charles has been relatively willing to take 
patches, altho he has been taking a break for awhile (he certainly 
deserved it after more than a year of nearly weekly betas, but that was 
what, nearly a year ago now...).  I'd love to see the feature and from 
the requests, I think others here would as well, so if you are up to 
coding it, post a patch to bugzilla and announce it here, and even if 
Charles doesn't update the official version right away, the patch will 
likely make its way into various distribution versions as well as into 
the self-compiled copies many of us regulars run.

-- 
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