[Pan-users] Re: prevent Pan from fetching active list

[Duncan]

Brian Sammon posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Sun, 01 Feb 2004 02:58:45 -0500:

> In regards to interface, I think I'd prefer it if there was a button or
> something saying "Import group list from file".

Not a button.  Buttons take up valuable real estate, and few enough would
use that function that it's not a good one for a button.  However, an
import.. menu entry would work, or, because a main menu entry still uses
valuable real estate (the Gnome HIG says something about to many menu
entries, and it has always been a challenge for PAN to comply), something
under the preferences dialog, or perhaps better, under the server dialog..
"import server settings from .newsrc", without having to go directly into
the settings for a specific server (thus, either importing to the current
one, or creating a new one with the imported settings) would be a good
idea.

> What is a little unclear about that system is knowing whether when you
> check that box, it's going to choose to have the .newsrc override the
> data from ~/.knews or vice-versa.

Yes.. indeed.  I think it depends on whether the file is there or not when
you tell it what file to use, but you are right, that isn't very clear.

> Anyways, I suppose I can live with that for now. Now what pan needs
> added next is "LIST ACTIVE" support, so it can find groups that are not
> in the local list, but are on the server. Maybe I'll have to do that.

That would indeed be nice.  Charles and Chris seem to be pretty busy with
their day jobs right now, and are finding it hard to do much on PAN, so if
you are a coder and can create the patch, they'll likely take it, unless,
as I explained with the above button suggestion, it goes against some
current design philosophy or goal.  (The worst are the folks that keep
suggesting PAN make it easy to top-post without a warning, or do something
else to break the GNKSA rating PAN developers are rightly proud of, and
worked hard to achieve.  It IS GPL code, so folks can change it if they
want, and Charles is usually happy to point to the file and lines that
would need changed too, if asked.  The one thing he won't do, however, is
change it for a distributed or official PAN version, and I fully agree. In
fact, Charles is far nicer about it than I'd likely be.  <g>)

Anyway, if you are a coder, perhaps you might consider doing something
with the filters/scoring as well, on elements besides what's available in
the overview.  Perhaps my biggest frustration with PAN has been that I
can't filter on non-overview headers or body or entire message content, as
that would make PAN far more resistant to spammers, nym changers, and the
like.  Unfortunately, Charles agreed that such filtering/scoring should be
possible, but said it wasn't a priority at this point, effectively putting
it off until either before 1.0, or bluesky.  I'm not a coder, and PAN is
pretty good as it is, so I've been patient, but it WOULD be nice. <g>

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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