[Pan-users] Re: New User Question

[Duncan]

Juan Wei posted on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:19:23 -0500 as excerpted:

> I have the latest pan on Ubuntu 10.10 but it does not have a "Filters"
> thingy on the menu line.
> 
> Don't I need that to make a "kill" file or is there another way?
> 
> Thanks.

Filters aren't on the menu line, and indeed, don't exist per se.  What pan 
uses instead of filters is "scoring".  Where filters are binary (killed/
normal, tho pan uses ignored in place of killed) or trinary (ignored/
normal/watched), scoring is much more flexible, allowing a range of values 
with incremental results such that any individual score might not result 
in an ignored or watched post, but the sum of several scores may still 
result in that.

Of course it's still possible to play absolutist and ignore (defined in 
pan as anything with a score -9999 or lower) or watch (+9999 or higher) 
with a single score, if you want, and there's shortcut actions for that in 
the articles menu (accessible either from the pull-down or in the context 
menu when context-clicking on an article), scoring simply allows more 
flexibility for those that want it, too.

Meanwhile, using scores, pan actually has several score "zones", as can be 
seen in the preferences dialog on the colors tab and in the view menu, 
header pane, match scores options.  I already mentioned three zones, 
ignored/normal/watched, but there's actually a few more, as well.  From 
worst/most-negative to best/most-positive, they are:

ignored         <=-9999
negative        -9998 to -1
normal/zero     0
medium          +1 to +4999
high            +5000 to +9998
watched         >=+9999

(Negative, normal, medium and high are my names.  pan itself doesn't label 
those zones in any way, simply providing them as distinct view/color zones 
by numeric score.)

By the way, it's worth noting that the scoring colors as set in prefs only 
apply to the score column in the headers tab/pane.  If you don't have the 
score column set to be shown, you won't see the color coding.  (Older pan 
used to color the whole line.  I don't know why it doesn't any more, but 
wish it still did.)

The way pan's view menu works can also be confusing.  Note that while it's 
possible to select each scoring zone in the view/header-pane/match-score 
section, even with ignored set to not match (thus not be shown), the match 
articles/threads/subthreads setting also affects what's shown, and if you 
have the match-threads option selected, few if any ignored posts will 
actually fail to show up unless they are single posts not appearing in a 
thread, because otherwise, other posts in the thread are likely to cause 
the entire thread to be shown.  The sub-threads option has a similar but 
less drastic effect.  Thus, the behavior isn't likely to be intuitive 
(hide ignored if match articles <=-9999 is unchecked, for instance), 
unless you have the articles/threads/subthreads selector set to articles 
only.

Finally, note that simply because an article has a particular score 
placing it in the ignored category does NOT mean pan automatically marks 
it as read (or deletes it).  When certain score zones are set not to 
display, it's often the case that after all visible posts are marked as 
read, pan still registers posts in that group as unread.  This is due to 
undisplayed posts.  If you have pan's options set to mark all posts read 
on exiting the group or on exiting pan, you can do so and it should mark 
them read.  If you don't (I don't, as keeping a post marked as unread 
allows me to come back to it later when I have more time), and similarly 
don't manually mark the group as read, the ignored posts will not be 
marked as read unless you set pan to display them so you can see them to 
mark them as read!  I find that rather frustrating, and at some point pan 
/might/ get the option to automatically mark ignored posts as read (and 
similarly, to automatically download watched posts), but it doesn't have 
that ability at the moment.  So I simply keep the view set to match all 
score zones, and use the score column (which I obviously have turned on) 
color-coding to warn me.  I can then mark those posts read without ever 
actually downloading them.  (Actually, in groups where a lot of posts are 
scored to ignore, I'll often set view to ONLY match ignored posts right 
after downloading new overviews/headers, select-all, which selects only 
ignored posts since that's all that's displayed then, mark-as-read or 
delete, then toggle the view to show everything again, and proceed as 
normal.)

Hope that helps in understanding how pan works. =:^)

-- 
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