Re: [Pan-users] Filtering out responses

[Duncan]

JCA posted on Tue, 23 May 2017 09:55:02 -0600 as excerpted:

> With Pan, it is easy enough to filter out posts from the many cranks
> present in different Usenet forum. However, what I have not been able to
> do is filtering out responses to that postings from other people.
> 
> With Pan, is it possible to filter out any threads initiated by a
> particular individual?

Sort of...

Pan has the ability to score (to ignore in this case) on message-IDs in 
the references header, which is technically how it implements the ignore 
thread option.

But the caveat is that in ordered to do that, you must see at least one 
post in the thread in ordered to add the rule scoring anything with the 
appropriate message-id in the references header.

Now, if you can _uniquely_ identify some consistent element of the target 
author's message-IDs (sometimes you can, sometimes not), you can of 
course manually setup a score on that in the references header, thus 
catching all of them (except those from clients that break the references 
header, you can tell those posts as they won't thread properly because 
pan uses the references header for threading), but that's a bit more 
technically demanding (regular expressions, etc), and iffy in any case, 
both because it may or may not be possible to identify such an element, 
and because if you believe you have identified a unique element and score 
on it, if it turns out /not/ to be unique, you'll be getting false-
positives on anything else that matches.

So indeed, "sort of", it is. =:^]  Unfortunately, for technical reasons 
it's not as "simply set and forget" as one might like.

-- 
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