[Pan-users] Re: score a troll

[Duncan]

thufir <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:57:02
+0000:

> He frequently changes from, organization, reply to and probably some
> other fields.  He looks to keep the complaints-to field, and approved
> field, constant, though.  what's the best way to filter out these
> messages?  I don't want to totally ignore them for now, just give them a
> low score.
> 
> score by path?

Pan's scoring is /extremely/ limited; unfortunately it's way too limited 
to be really useful against someone deliberately changing their posting 
info.  This is probably my top complaint on pan, and has been for a very 
long time, since before old-pan got scoring, while it still was simple 
filtering, I'd have preferred fixing this to scoring, but not having the 
talent necessary to provide a patch and with Charles' priorities 
obviously being different...

The problem is that as implemented, pan only scores on the usual 
"overview" headers, that is, the headers available before the post is 
actually downloaded, which generally amounts to the ones displayed in the 
header pane, subject, author, date, references (so proper threading can 
be done), message-id, xref (cross-posting), lines and bytes ..., that's 
pretty much it.  If the poster is varying all of those, you're SOL.  
Organization, x-newsreader, x-trace, path, x-complaints-to, etc, are 
unavailable for scoring.

Due to the address munging gmane (Gateway for Mail And NEws, what I use 
to read the list) does to anything looking like an email address on this 
list, I can't check so very easily, but it's possible you may be able to 
figure out an element in the references you can score -- provided you 
want to score replies to him as well, or maybe the message-id (tho I'm 
not positive you can score on that but I /think/ someone reported that 
you can, you'd have to try manually adding it to the the scorefile to 
see).

The other alternatives are using another news client (with proper 
scoring) for that group, running your own local news server, leafnode or 
the like, locally, or just continuing to cope with it manually.

Or, of course, if you have the talent or significant financial resources, 
you can either code up a patch, or sponsor someone (Charles maybe) to 
code the requisite functionality for you.

-- 
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