[Pan-users] Re: Can Pan whitelist authors?

[Duncan]

Beartooth SenectoFlatuloid posted
<address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Tue,
13 Dec 2005 13:42:59 -0500:

> Maybe it can; I have never gotten my mind around the intricacies of rules,
> scores, and other such things too fierce to mention. But I can plonk a
> writer; can I do the opposite? 
> 
> Example: I look into dc.general from time to time, and invariably delete
> 99 44/100 % of it unread. I could make a list, almost off the top of my
> head, of half a dozen or so posters there, whitelist them all, delete
> everything else in that group sight unseen by some automagic setting, and
> miss maybe 0.01 - 0.1 % of what I normally read there.

What you want is "watch", which effectively sets a 9999 score on anything
matching what's watched.  It is the exact opposite of "ignore", which is a
-9999 score.

So, score each author you want to watch, select the "watch" radio button
under "score", set the group (or .* regular expression to match all
groups), and don't forget to set the expiration -- the 30-day default is
very seldom long enough for me, perhaps never expiring, or anyway, 90-365
days (a year), is what I normally use.

You can then uncheck everything except for watched in the  scores section
of the filter menu, to ONLY view watched authors, and/or set the colors as
desired in the preferences menu, so watched posts stand out in the
overview (aka header) pane.

Three additional variations on that:

For some groups, rather than setting watched on everyone, I'll make use of
the color coding possibilities.  For my ISP groups, for instance, I set
posts from newsmaster and the couple other ISP employees that post as 
watched (highest score color zone), set certain others, generally the
handful of folks that run *ix but adding one other highly respected poster
as well, to 5000, so they match the high score color, and set a third
group, those who seem to consistently have useful comments, to 100,
putting them in the medium score color group.

On the bottom end, I set rules to delete "ignored" posts, and have a small
group of killfiled folks "ignored", so their posts are deleted.  (Note
that here, I normally choose 90-270 days, 3-9 months, as expiry, since I'm
a bit of an optimist and hope they mature a bit within that time, so they
get another chance after that.  If not, back in they go, for a longer
period, 1-2 years, the second time.  I'm not likely to set a longer expiry
than that, except for spammers, because even if I think they are
incurable, hopefully, within a couple years they will have moved
elsewhere, and that keeps the score list from growing too long over time.)

I set a rule for "negative/low" scores to automatically mark read, but not
delete.  This will apply to the relatively few folks who haven't caused
offense enough to be killfiled entirely, but who don't normally say
anything worthwhile enough in their posts to spend time on.  The
auto-mark-read means I don't normally see the posts, but if someone who I
/do/ normally see posts a reply, I can toggle the view read posts thing
and the view low scores thing and see the post being replied to.  As I
said, I don't use this zone very much, but it has proven useful on
occasion.  I typically set a shorter expiry here, 60-90 days, after which
they return to zero-score land.

The second variation I've already mentioned -- setting filters and rules
based on the scores.  In particular, if you normally view only unread
posts, you'll want to delete (as I do with ignored) or at least mark read
(as I do with negative scored) posts you won't normally see.  If you
don't, PAN will say there's still unread posts in a group, but you won't
see them because you have set it not to view them.

On the high end, you might want to set rules to automatically download the
posts scored as "watched", and possibly high and medium scored posts as
well (particularly if you use my color marking scheme rather than just
marking everyone watched), since you'll almost certainly want to look at
them anyway.  Personally, I don't bother with this, since I've a decent
speed connection and text posts anyway download almost instantly anyway,
so it's not worth pre-downloading.  However, this could be incredibly
useful for those on dialup, or those using this technique on binary groups.

Finally, a third variation, a bit more advanced, would be to expand the
color coding idea to distinctively mark low and ignored color zone posts,
instead of using them as they normally would be, to not view them.  This
would work best on groups with only a handful of different posters or
zones you want to mark, and with either no one you want to truly ignore,
or where you want to ignore EVERYONE not scored either up or down, into
one of the categories. You could then setup a rule such that ONLY
zero-scored posts would be deleted or marked read, with BOTH above zero
and below zero scoring posts retained.  This would give you the two
additional below-zero score groups (ignored and low) as distinctive color
marking groups, while if setup correctly, would delete or mark read
(according to the action chosen on the rule you setup) any post NOT
specifically assigned a positive or negative score.

Given the ability to set the groups to which rules apply, one could even
use different schemes for different groups, such that for most groups,
ignored posts are deleted and low/negative scoring posts are  marked read,
but for a couple special groups, only the unscored posts (those still
scored zero) would be deleted or marked read, with others categorized by
color according to their score.

-- 
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 in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html