Re: Question / feature request (?)

[Tim McNamara]

Steve Linberg <slinberg@crocker.com> writes:

> Greetings, gnus hackers.
>
> Is there a way to make gnus maintain a reasonable cache of killed
> article numbers, and automatically kill any child of a killed
> article?
>
> I read a group that is very heavy with trolls, and also (sadly) with
> idiots who feed them.  My killfile is huge already, but it doesn't
> handle the problem of trolls starting threads with non-obvious
> subject lines, and the cascade of dummies who respond to them.  I'd
> practically have to killfile the entire group to get around this,
> but some of the people who feed the trolls have insightful things to
> say when they're not doing so, and I'd rather not kf them too.
>
> I'd like to be able to just kill all descendents of a killfiled
> post, in other words, obviously subject to a reasonable limit of
> cached article numbers.  For my specific purposes, a week's worth -
> maybe a thousand or two - would probably be sufficient.
>
> Is this possible?  Has anybody done it?  I'm not an elisp warrior,
> and this feels like a somewhat daunting "hello, world" to get
> started in elisp with.

Well, you could use Gnus' excellent scoring abilities to score up the
people whose posts you want to see, score down the predictable trolls
and idiots, and then set a threshhold to kill all the articles below a
cutoff score.  As a bonus, scoring is faster than killfile in Gnus.

http://www.gnus.org and http://my.gnus.org are great resources, as
well as the Info about Gnus that is built-in to Emacs.  There's a lot
of information in the latter about scoring.