[Pan-users] prevent Pan from fetching active list

[Brian Sammon]

When I use pan for the first time (for NNTP) it wants to pop up a window saying
  We don't have a list of groups for "server"
  Shall we download one?
and then spend 15 minutes(over dialup) downloading the huge list of groups.

Since I'm on dialup currently, I'd like to avoid this step.  From my reading 
of NNTP specs, this isn't really necessary, because:
  1) I know which groups I want to read
  2) Most servers support the "LIST ACTIVE" command to find newsgroups if I
        can't remember the exact name.

Is there anyone working on adding this option (to not download the full list) 
to Pan?
Alternatively, does anyone have any hacks to prevent Pan from doing this?
Maybe a little script that I can run to generate the groups list (perhaps from 
a .newsrc file) instead of downloading it?