[Pan-users] Re: Scoring question

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff posted on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:00:47 -0800 as excerpted:

> One of the groups I follow is intermittently infested by an
> exceptionally obnoxious troll.  He clearly knows he's not welcome,
> because every time he shows up, he's posting from a different email
> address to get around killfiles.  However, he always uses the same name.
>   Is there any way to force Pan to score on the name, instead of the
> email address, so that I can block him once and for all?

You're lucky he uses the same name.  We had one of those in a group I was 
in some years ago, who changed everything he could, but there were a 
couple headers that the server appended that he couldn't get at.  
Unfortunately, they weren't standard overview headers, and since pan only 
filters on overview headers, I couldn't filter it.  Thus, for /years/, 
I've had in a request to filter on arbitrary non-overview headers and the 
body.  That request went in before the pan rewrite that started with 
version 0.90, before pan had scores (it was only ignore/normal/watch at 
that point)... but it was marked target "bluesky", which means, it'd be 
nice... someday...  Basically, unless someone with coding skills submits a 
patch, it's not going to happen. Unfortunately, I don't have C/C++ coding 
skills...

But blocking by from/author name isn't a problem, since that's in the 
overview headers.  Score on author, set contains, starts with, or matches 
regex, as appropriate, and delete the email address portion (between the 
angle brackets <>), setup the rest of the score and you should be good to 
go.

> For that matter, is there a way to force Pan to mark all posts with a
> score of -1000 as read as they come off the server, instead of having to
> do that manually, or should I report that to Bugzilla as a bug?

Old-pan had that possibility as one of the implementable "rules".  
Unfortunately, Charles considered rules too complicated for most users to 
setup, and I believe he was right as that was the feature we got many of 
our questions on, so he wanted to implement it differently for new-pan.  
Unfortunately, while we've talked about the UI, that remains the one 
feature from old pan that remains without a replacement.

So it's already requested, by a lot of folks in fact, but well, Charles 
hasn't had much time to code in the last three years or so, and pan has 
more or less just sat there.  You probably know about khaley's git repo, 
where most of the new stuff is going, but that's mostly bug patches and a 
couple very trivial features.  Someone's gotta code the feature before it 
can be added there too.  So if you can code or know someone else that 
might be interested...

As discussed, the feature would be called something like "Auto-Actions", 
and there'd probably be a new auto-actions tab in the pan config dialog.  
It would use the same score categories that the colors tab uses, and be 
setup something like this:

Automatically:

        download messages with a score category at or above ...

        delete messages with a score category at or below ...

        mark-read messages with a score category at or below ...

Each of those would end with a drop-down box with the score categories in 
it, disabled, -9999 and below, -9998 to -1, 0/normal, +1 to +4999, +5000 
to +9998, +9999 and above.

We've discussed whether the defaults should all be "disabled" to fit in 
with the principle of least surprise for upgraders, or whether they should 
be the arguably more logical download watched/9999, delete ignored/-9999, 
mark-read below-zero, or a bit more conservative, only mark-read ignored, 
and don't delete anything, automatically.  However, the first bit is 
actually getting the code there and working.  Then we can debate what the 
most appropriate defaults are, or the coder will decide, possibly modified 
by Charles when he adds the feature to the official version, if someone 
else codes it.

All we need is a coder willing to do the work and submit the patch...  At 
least then, khaley can pick it up for his pan git repo, regardless of 
whether Charles does for the main gnome pan git repo.

-- 
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