Re: [Pan-users] Quirks with ignored authors or posts

[Benjamin Esham]

Hi Duncan, and thanks for your extensive explanation! I've been reading this
list off and on for years, and I've seen you write some long messages, but I
think this one takes the cake ;-D

Duncan wrote:

> Benjamin Esham posted on Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:42:08 +0000 as excerpted:
> 
> > Pan has a built-in mechanism for ignoring an author, i.e. scoring all of
> > their posts at -9999. I see two (related) problems with the current
> > implementation: first, that the "blocked" posts are not actually marked
> > as read,
> 
> [snip]
> 
> The [Actions] tab could then look something like this, taking the idea
> from how the scoring UI works:
> 
> Automatically:
> 
> Delete    posts scoring at or below     [dropdown menu]
> 
> Mark-read posts scoring at or below     [dropdown menu]
> 
> Cache     posts scoring at least        [dropdown menu]
> 
> Save      attachments scoring at least  [dropdown menu]

This would work for me, and seems simple enough. Unfortunately I don't know
enough C++ even to begin to approach something like Pan, but maybe I'll
start poking around the sources in my spare time...

> KHaley created an upstream/release branch, and PKovar began pulling from
> it and committing to the official gnome repo.  On February 15, 2011, the
> first PKovar/KHaley release was announced, version 0.134, again containing
> mostly accumulated bugfixes and minor maintenance patches (to keep it
> working against current libraries and building with current gcc, for
> instance), but with a few very minor functionality tweaks.
> 
> That was the first /release/ of pan's new era. =:^)
> 
> There has been one release since then, 0.135, on June 5.  This one had a
> few more minor features, but they're still feeling their way, so nothing
> major yet.

It's great that development has restarted! On a slightly OT note... I
recently pulled and built from K. Haley's pan2 repo on Github, but the
binary's "About" screen still says that it's version 0.134. Was there just
an oversight in setting the version number, or is there a more up-to-date
repository I should be using instead?

> PAN HISTORY IS BEING MADE!
> 
> And here news is supposed to be dying!

I just wish there were as many people on Usenet as there were even five
years ago! :-) Although these days, I'm more inclined to read Gmane lists
(as news) than actual newsgroups.

> [snip]
> 
> > [...] and second, that replies to a blocked post are still shown.
> > 
> > The second issue is a little more serious, since in Pan's display it
> > looks like replies to blocked posts are actually replies to the blocked
> > post's parent. This could be taken care of by automatically ignoring the
> > subthread started by any post with a score of -9999. (If I've specified
> > that I *never* want to read posts by a certain user, you can bet that I
> > don't want to read the replies to those posts either.)
> 
> Well, they /are/ in the downline thread of the blocked-post's parent, so
> the threading part is correct, given the blocked post isn't appearing.
> 
> Meanwhile, you /do/ know about the subthread-scoring feature, right?

Er... which part of all this is the subthread-scoring feature? Actually, I
guess that if I keep "hidden" articles visible, then I can just select them
in the article list and mark their entire subthreads as read. (Spam and
trolls are infrequent enough in the groups I visit that this isn't
impractical to do.)


Cheers,
-- 
Benjamin D. Esham  |  address@hidden  |  www.bdesham.info
“...English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just
borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets
for new vocabulary.”                              — James Nicoll