[Pan-users] Re: Filtering on news path

[Duncan]

Mark Eggers posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Thu, 06 Jan 2005 11:13:26 -0800:

> I would like to delete or not even download the headers for any news
> article that contains 53ab2750 as part of the path.  Is this possible, and
> if so, how would I accomplish this.
> 
> This is the only commonality I can find for some pretty
> annoying newsgroup spam.  This string appears to be an IP address
> (53.171.27.50 - internal Mercedes Benz address).
> 
> I'm wading through the source right now, but I've not seen anything
> obvious so far.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers.

If I'm wrong, someone will no-doubt correct me, but I don't believe the
path header is normally part of the overview.  The limited headers of the
overview are unfortunately the only part of the message PAN can score or
filter at this point.

IMO, this is one of PAN's greatest "areas of opportunity".  I've wanted
"full message" filter/scoring for some time, since well before scoring.
Others have requested other filtering abilities (like the ability to
filter HTML posts) that this would provide as well.  

Unfortunately, when I asked back then, Charles agreed it was a feature
generally needed before release 1.0, but said honestly, it was a
back-burner item for him and that it likely would be for some time to
come.  Then last year, he was busy, and PAN development was essentially
frozen for an entire year.  He's back to developing now, but in the mean
time, others had been working on another major feature, the switch to a
decent database (sqlite library) backend, and after a quick maintenance
release likely sometime this quarter, integration of that is likely to be
the next major project.  Thus, it's unlikely full message scoring will get
front-burnered until the second half of this year at the earliest.

That said, Charles has always said "patches welcome".  If you are looking
thru the source that implies you have at least some skills in the area I
don't.  That would be one patch I'd consider applying here, before it made
CVS!  I could DEFINITELY use it, and so could a number of others who've
made similar requests.  Therefore, if you feel inspired, please hack away.
It's actually likely to make it into CVS as well, assuming a well made
patch that fits well with the current code, given Charles' past
invitations.  He's generally been fairly helpful on the developer list as
well, and like I said, he's around again, so if you have any questions
about implementation or something, ask away over there, and see what
transpires.

...

Alternatively, I've toyed with the idea of downloading messages, then
shutting down PAN and running a script to do my required filtering, then
starting PAN again and getting back to work.  However, I've never actually
written such a script.

Alternative two...  Since I've switched to klibido for its multi-server
handling recently for binaries, that leaves PAN for text only.  For that,
I've been wondering if knode would work better.  I haven't tried it in
years, but I keep thinking about it.  There are of course other news
readers available if KDE isn't your thing, at least for text, as well. 
With klibido being so effective at multi-server multi-connection binary
harvesting, even if it's less than a year old and doesn't have filtering
or etc yet, it /does/ take pressure off of PAN as the leading *ix binary
news client, in any case, and there have always been various text news
clients around.  The biggest problem for me now is that I have the
familiarity of a number of years with PAN and on this group/list, and am
comfortable with how it works in general, so I'm hesitant to leave it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin