[Pan-users] Re: Trying to filer out cross posting in Pan 0.132

[Duncan]

"Jonathan D. Armendariz"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 28 Feb 2009
17:41:42 -0800:

> Hello,
> 
> I had unfortunately lost my backup which had my score file I used to
> filter out cross posting. I did set it up initially by adding a scoring
> rule. Below is a copy of what it looks like:
> 
> Score:: =-9999
> Xref: (.*:){2}
> Message-ID: googlegroups.com
> Message-ID: webtv.com
> Message-ID: msntv.com
> Message-ID: msntv.net
> 
> As you can see from the above I am trying to kill off any articles that
> cross-post to 2 or more groups and filtering out known sources of Usenet
> spam. For some reason it's not doing this so I am wondering where I went
> wrong and am wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to properly set
> this up? Any suggestions would be most welcome.

It looks generally correct, but...

First observation, maybe you have it in the scorefile and just skipped 
posting it, but in just what you posted, there's no section header, aka 
newsgroups line.  If you want it to apply to all groups, try simply

[*] or [*.*]

(Remember that the newsgroups line, aka section header, is NOT a regex, 
but a * wildcard expression.)

Second, you say it's not working, but don't mention /what/ isn't 
working.  The entire score?  Just the cross-posting part?  Just the 
Message-ids?  Just one of the Message-ids?

Assuming it's the entire thing not working (and that the score is in an 
appropriately labeled section as above), I'd suggest commenting (with an 
initial % char) all but one test, probably the cross-posting test, and 
get that working first.  Then you can uncomment the others, one at a time 
if need be, and get them working too.

Third, this one is trivial, but for those message-id lines, you most 
likely want \. where you have . as a regex . matches any-char, and you're 
wanting to match a literal . .

Fourth, I can't explain why your xref/xpost match isn't working (assuming 
it's not simply a missing section header aka newsgroups line), but it 
does look a bit more complex than necessary.  You're matching two colons, 
right?  What about this?

Xref: :.*:

or to ensure at least one character between the colons

Xref: :..*:

Fifth, I never remember whether : is a metachar or not.  Thus, I'd 
suggest trying it with the escaped \: instead of just : , just in case.

Sixth, did you try {2,} in case the implementation is sensitive to that?

-- 
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