[Pan-users] Re: Deleting groups

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:50:45
+0000:

> On Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:27:49 -0700, John Sedore wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Jim
>> Henderson<address@hidden> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:44:27 -0700, John Sedore wrote:
>>>
>>>> Can anyone tell me how to delete individual groups from the group
>>>> list? I'm using version 0.132.
>>>
>>> Right click, delete the groups' articles, and then unsubscribe from
>>> the group.
>>>
>>> Jim
>> 
>> Thanks Jim! But what if I'm trying to remove groups from the list of
>> those available, not just unsubscribing?
> 
> Like Travis said, if it's on the news server, it'll show in either the
> subscribed or unsubscribed groups list.  You can go in and edit the
> newsrc files to remove it, but the next time you refresh the groups from
> the server, it'll be added back in.
> 
> But when you unsubscribe, the group is moved from the "subscribed
> groups" list to the "other groups" list, so you can collapse that and
> not have to look at the groups you don't want to see at least.

This is correct.  However, regulars here couldn't have seriously expected 
me to let this go without my take, so here it is...

What I originally wondered about the original post (but didn't have time 
to post a reply to at the time) was /where/ the group was to be deleted 
from?  The news server?  *ALL* news servers worldwide?  The subscribed 
group list?

Somewhat obviously once you think about it, attempting to "delete 
individual groups from the group list", where "the" is taken in the 
context of "the Internet", doesn't tend to work.  As has been said many 
times, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around 
it." (John Gilmore, according to wikipedia, see the Streisand effect link 
below.)  Of course, that doesn't keep the censoring types from /trying/, 
sometimes with a bit of success, see the articles on removal of groups 
based on the NYAG's supposed kiddy porn content from some time ago. (But 
no one, least of all the news providers involved, could actually 
investigate the claims, lest they be guilty of downloading and looking at 
the stuff themselves, so they had to choose to act or not act based on 
the NYAG's claims alone... censorship at its best (um... worst)!  Also 
see the Australian efforts and the dental office(!!), etc, that were 
somehow on the block list there.)  Other times it doesn't work so well, 
see the wikipedia article on the Streisand effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Also of interest is the recent UK attempt to censor/ban an album entry 
(due to the cover) on Wikipedia itself, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation#Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia

and the album:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer

Ultimately in that case they backed down with this statement (from the 
Streisand effect link):

"IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent 
images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts 
have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for 
Wikipedia and its users." 

In fact, as is often the case, it's quite likely WAY more people checked 
the page and saw the image they were trying to ban as a direct result of 
the attempt, than would have ever looked at that page and seen the image 
otherwise.  I know I'd have been extremely unlikely to have ever come 
across it otherwise (tho I'm in the US and thus wasn't affected by the 
ban), and the same likely goes, now, for many readers of this list.  
Among other things, it was feature news on all the usual Internet geek 
and anti-censorship sites, including slashdot.org, arstechnica.com (link 
wrapped), UK's own The Register, and others:

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/12/07/1253228.shtml
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/12/09/210230.shtml

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/12/iwf-backs-off-of-
scorpions-wikipedia-block-after-criticism.ars

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/07/brit_isps_censor_wikipedia/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/10/iwf_reverses_wikiban/

Umm... if you can't tell by now, I'm stridently anti-censorship! =:^)

Meanwhile, back to the question.  The case of deletion from subscribed 
groups is simple enough, and has already been covered sufficiently.  That 
leaves the case of deletion from the group list as downloaded from the 
news service provider.  

As Jim says, you can hand edit the newsrc files (in the ~/.pan2 directory 
by default) for the various servers that you have configured, that have 
the group, and remove the listing there.  He also mentions that when you 
update/refresh the group lists, it'll be back.  What he does /not/ say is 
that in pan, refreshing the group list is always a manual operation 
(unlike some clients which do it automatically every time you connect, OE 
comes to mind here).  Thus, if you really don't want the thing showing 
up, and have no reason to refresh the group list to get new groups, just 
don't.

In fact, you could remove the entire list of unsubscribed groups.  The 
newsrc files follow the standard newsrc file format which can be googled, 
but in short, the group name is immediately followed by the subscribed/
unsubscribed character, a colon (:) for subscribed, an exclamation mark 
(!) for unsubscribed, then a space and a comma (,) separated list of 
individual article numbers and ranges.  Thus, removing every line without 
a colon, a simple enough sed operation, should remove every unsubscribed 
group from the list.

Do note that you can't delete the entire newsrc file, or you'll delete 
pan's tracking of the articles you've seen/read on that server as well as 
the list of subscribed groups.  Without the file, pan will want to 
download the whole list again, including the groups you wanted removed! 
Similarly, you can't simply remove the write permissions, as pan then 
can't update its read-message tracking.

If you've visited a group and want to remove all trace of it, in addition 
to its newsrc file lines, you'll want to remove entries in group-
preferences.xml, if any, entries in newsgroups.xov, and the file for the 
group in the groups subdir.  Additionally, downloading the groups list 
populates the newsgroups.dsc descriptions list and the newsgroups.ynm 
postings allowed (y), not allowed (n) or moderated (m) list, so 
regardless of whether you've visited the group or not, you might want to 
remove the entries there at the same time you remove them from the newsrc 
files.  FWIW, I believe you can set the perms on these last two files 
read-only, if you don't plan on updating your group list.  That should 
have the effect of eliminating them from the cleanup list if the group 
list is updated again.

You will likely also wish to eliminate any cached messages from that 
group.  A file-content string search for the offending group name in the 
cache dir should be sufficient to find them.  However, since the cache is 
only 10 MB by default, it won't have a lot of them unless you only do 
text groups or have manually edited preferences.xml to increase the cache 
size, since at a 10-meg cache size, binaries from other groups will have 
likely overwritten most articles from the group in question before too 
long at all.

Meanwhile, as it's conceivable that your reason for doing all this might 
be over concern for what "little eyes" might see before they're mature 
enough to handle it, note that it's possible to have multiple pan 
instances, each with its own configuration.  The default configuration is 
stored in ~/.pan2, but by setting the PAN_HOME environmental variable in 
the environment pan inherits to point to another location, you can setup 
as many separate instances/profiles as you wish.  Here for example, I 
have text, test, and bin instances, each with its own separate config.  
It would be entirely possible to setup a default config stripped of 
offensive groups and linked from the usual pan launcher icon/menu-item/
whatever, for your child to use, while setting up a short starter script 
(say pan.adult or whatever) that sets and exports the PAN_HOME var 
pointing elsewhere, before starting pan.  You could then start the "fully 
loaded" pan.adult (or whatever) from the command prompt or run dialog 
(but beware run dialog history) without it ever being in the menu or 
other normal launcher at all, thus yielding a bit of protection for 
exploring fingers, who presumably don't use the command prompt much at 
that age.  That'll let you have the full list of groups, subscribed or 
not, in pan.adult, without having them listed for those little eyes.

Of course, a better solution might be to setup the kid with his/her own 
user login, thus their own home dir including their own ~/.pan2 dir as 
well as letting either you or them configure/customize the rest of their 
login, entirely separately from your own.  But if you let the kids play 
around on your login, and they aren't old enough to be doing much with 
the command line yet, the separate pan instances/profiles could be 
useful, as they are in other cases, like my separate text/test/bin pan 
instances, here.

-- 
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