[Pan-users] Re: New Pan problem

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:12:29
-0800:

> On 12/08/2008 Duncan wrote:
>> So I very seldom use the mark-all-as-read function, thus never mark to
>> the high-water-mark, so if it's wacky for some reason, I never see it.
> 
> I, OTOH, use it regularly.  There's one active member of the group that
> I've killfiled, (i.e., given the lowest possible score) but Pan can't be
> set to mark all his posts read, so I have to do that myself to get rid
> of them.  And yet, until this situation with changing servers, it was
> never an issue.  Go know!

That has been an on-going frustration with new-pan.  Old-pan had what was 
called "rules", which allowed one to select posts by score or age or 
attachment status, etc, and apply various actions, auto-delete, auto-mark-
read, auto-mark-for-download, etc.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Charles considered the older implementation 
too complex, and he had a point -- it was somewhat difficult for the non-
geek to figure out, and we did get a reasonable number of questions 
asking how to do stuff that rules took care of.

Definitely unfortunately, there's no substitute as yet in current/new-
pan.  The easier to use solution as discussed, would involve another tab 
in the preferences dialog, constructed something like this (turn off 
autowrap and set monospace font to view as intended):

Do these actions automatically:

  Download      posts scored at least   [ +9999 or above / watched  ]
  Mark-read     posts scored at most    [ -1 to -9998    / negative ]
  Delete        posts scored at most    [ -9999 or below / ignored  ]

The [...] indicates a dropdown box, with choices similar to those found 
on the color preferences tab:

Disabled
-9999 or below / ignored
-1 to -9998    / negative
0              / normal
+1 to +4999    / medium
+5000 to +9998 / high
+9999 or above / watched

Alternatively, there could be a checkbox toggle to the left of each 
choice, the disabled entry would be omitted from the dropdown, and the 
dropdown would be disabled if the checkbox wasn't checked.

Alternatively, it could be a listing of each score category, with a 
radiobutton choice for each, like this:

For score categories of the following, do automatically:

                           Nothing  Download  Mark-read  Delete
ignored  / -9999 or below     o         o         o         x
negative / -1 to -9998        o         o         x         o
normal   / 0                  x         o         o         o
medium   / +1 to +4999        x         o         o         o
high     / +5000 to +9998     x         o         o         o
watched  / +9999 or above     o         x         o         o

Any of these would allow some flexibility for those of us who use scoring 
not as scoring per-se, but rather as a form of color-coding, in some 
groups.  In my ISP groups for instance, I'll score (thereby color-coding) 
posts from ISP employees one color (watched), those users who are 
consistently informative another (high), and those regulars who are 
usually interesting if not always informative yet another (medium).  
Ignored still has its usual meaning as does negative, ignored being those 
who are so consistently uninformative (spam, flamers, etc) I don't want 
to ever see and usually delete, the latter those who are usually more 
noise than signal, so I don't want to see them normally but want to have 
their messages available to pull up if referenced by someone else.  These 
get marked-read without actually reading.  But everything above zero 
would get downloaded by default, and for the most part, only non-regulars 
or those posters who are entirely neutral to me would be scored the 
default zero, visible but not downloaded by default.  It would also allow 
those who wish to to download everything by default.

The shipped defaults have been up for some debate, whether they should 
all be do nothing, thus not surprising anybody doing an upgrade when the 
feature is added, or whether they should be basically as I marked them 
above, auto-download watched, auto-delete or at least auto-mark-read 
ignored.  With a default cache size of 10 MB however, auto-download 
wouldn't be a sensible default for binary groups, so that would probably 
remain disabled, and it can well be argued that delete is too strong a 
default even for ignored, tho auto-mark-read would be useful.

Right now and until something like this gets coded, you are correct, 
ignored doesn't really ignore, and that's a problem.  Your solution is a 
full mark-read, but that doesn't work for those of us who routinely and 
deliberately keep some messages marked unread to look at later, when we 
have more time or aren't so tired.

Personally, I use the ignored scoring (sparingly except for spam, but I 
do use it), but set the view checkbox to show me ignored posts as well.  
I have the score column visible in the overviews/headers display and 
color coding set appropriately, so it's immediately obvious that a 
message is ignored, and I normally just hit delete when I come to it.

This is another of those areas where if I knew C++ myself, there'd 
already be a patch for this.  If Charles had applied it, great, otherwise 
it'd be filed as a bug that I could link to for discussions like this for 
people to apply themselves if desired.  Again unfortunately, I don't know 
C++, so... <shrug>

-- 
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