[Pan-users] Re: What does WATCH, reall?

[Duncan]

Nuno Tavares posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sat, 22 May 2004 21:44:48 +0100:

> I'm using pan for quite long, and really miss the watch function (as in
> Forte' Agent).
> 
> I set pan to watch a specific thread, and i expect it to: 1) highlight
> (differently) the thread, or add an icon (like glasses, f.i.) 2) to
> download automatically new followups.
> 
> Perhaps I'm wrong?
> What's the point in that function?
> How may i know if a thread is being WATCHED.

What WATCHED does now is set a very high score on the post, and those
following it that include the message-id of the original WATCHED post in
their references header (thus, all children that have a whole references
line, tho if the thread gets long or the references header gets borked,
some children might not get watched).

What you do with that high score is up to you.  You can set PAN to
auto-download scores above X if you wish, thus setting it ONLY for
watched, or for watched but not if you have a further score subtracting
points, or for anything with a positive score, or..

You can also set different colors based on score, with several different
"zones" available.

Of course, ignore is the reverse of watch.  Thus, in addition to setting
negative and SUPER-negative scores to some nasty color, and not displaying
them by default, you can choose to actually delete the overview for that
post if desired, or mark it as read automatically (thus preventing ignored
posts from still showing up in the unread post tally).

Of course, this is dependent on version.  Before scoring, watched and
ignored posts worked a bit differently, as it was a yes/no kind of thing,
without the degrees of good and bad that scoring allows.  They could still
be colored and auto-d/led or deleted as appropriate, but there wasn't as
much flexibility, of course, to do additional incremental stuff, b4
scoring.

I just wish Charles, or someone else knowing C well enough to submit a
patch, would fix it so we could score on other headers besides the
overview, and on the entire article.  Not being able to do so can be a
serious handicap at times and in some groups.  Unfortunately, while PAN is
one of the better *ix news clients out there, it's still rather immature
in this area.

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