Re: [Pan-users] sorting headers by date.

[Duncan]

Hendrik Boom posted on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:22:38 +0000 as excerpted:

> Pan is happy to combine the various posts into threads,and I can even
> get it so sort the list of threads in the header pane in various orders.
> But when it sorts by date, whether i ascending or descending order, the
> date is uses for a thread is the date of the oldest post in the thread.
> 
> Is it possible to get it to sort by the date of the youngest post in the
> thread?

While to my knowledge the direct answer is no, not possible, there's a 
workaround that I use when I need that functionality.

There's a "thread headers" toggle under view, header pane.  Switch that 
off temporarily and you'll get individual messages sorted by whatever 
your sort mode is.

By then sorting by date, you can easily find the youngest posts or those 
posted in a particular time period, regardless of the thread they're in.  
Once you find what you're looking for, you can select the post and toggle 
threading back on, so your selected post now appears in thread context 
once again. =:^)

The same technique can of course be used for search by author, etc.

And that combined with another feature, secondary sort, you can do things 
like sort individual author's posts by date, etc.  To do this you'd sort 
by date, then by author, so author becomes the primary sort pattern, but 
for each author, individual messages are still sorted by the last sort 
pattern, date in this case.  That allows such tricks as finding the last 
post by a particular author, or all their posts from a particular time 
period, regardless of the thread.  Again, once you've found a particular 
post, you can select it and rethread, so it appears in proper thread 
context. =:^)

As one example of practical use, I recently used that technique to figure 
out that a particular poster in one group I'm in has a strong two-month 
posting pattern, reasonably consistent over several years.  He'll be out 
of the group with few if any messages for two months, then will reply to 
dozens of threads in a day or two, then be out for a couple months again, 
then reply to a whole bunch in a day again...

(This particular poster, Lars, happens to be the originator and head 
admin of the gmane.org list2news service.  He's a very busy man and there 
are other gmane admins for various tasks, but it's his show and for 
instance it seems to be him alone responsible for the block lists.  
People can end up on the block list for accidentally pulling too many 
messages, perhaps they had a misconfigured news client or something, and 
he's the only one that can get them unblocked.  He's usually pretty good 
about doing so if asked nicely and people who are unblocked aren't 
normally repeat violators, but two months really can seem like an 
eternity if you were depending on gmane for your lists, as many people 
including me, for this list too, do.  Tho people can still use the web 
interface if they have to, and of course people can still subscribe to 
the lists directly if they have to, but for people used to the 
convenience of a news client as well as keeping their list traffic 
separate from their email traffic, both options are poor longer-term 
substitutes for the gmane's list2news service!  But it's a free service 
with Lars running the show, and if it takes him a couple months to 
respond and unblock you, that's simply what it takes.  I've been able to 
use the two-month pattern data to at least give people some idea how long 
it could take to get unblocked, tho of course it depends when in that 
cycle they got blocked in the first place.)

Hope that solves your problem! =:^)

-- 
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