[Pan-users] Re: Pan's plonk file has broken

[Duncan]

chris posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Sat, 07 May 2005 05:31:31 +0930:

> Hi. I was playing with the Filter buttons on pan 0.14.2.91 for ubuntu.
> And I can't get it back to how it was originally.
> 
> Now all the posts by people who are in my plonk file, appear highlighted
> in black. They're not supposed to appear at all.

Deselect the "Match Scores of -9999 (Ignored)" entry on the filter menu.

That will hide ignored (plonked) posts, but they still exist in PANs list,
and without further intervention, still show up as unread.  That's always
seemed illogical to me.  If I'm ignoring them, I CERTAINLY don't want them
to count as unread, where they aren't displayed for me to mark them read
(unless I simply mark the entire group read, but I often keep messages
around, marked unread, to reply to latter, so that won't work, either). 
Further, if they are "ignored", I want them to be "ignored", that is, not
appear in the counts /at/ /all/, as if they were never there to download.

This can be accomplished by setting up an appropriate rule, based on an
appropriate filter.  First, I set up a filter, called "Ignored", select
the "Article score is at least", and set it to "Low" (which is now
/including/ all /but/ ignored), add it to the filter condition list,
select it, and hit the invert button, to invert the logic so it's now
/only/ ignored, instead of all /but/ ignored.  OK out of the filter
dialog, and I now have the filter "Ignored", that I can apply with a rule.

I then create a new rule, also called "Ignored", and ensure that "Apply to
incoming" is checked.  Switching to the filter tab, I select the "Ignored"
filter.  On the newsgroups tab, "Rule applies to all newsgroups".  On the
actions tab, I have "Delete article" selected, altho if you don't want to
be so extreme, you can simply tell it to "Mark as" "Read", instead.  OKing
out of that, you now have your filter, which will automatically mark as
read or delete all future "ignored" articles as PAN downloads the
overviews (wrongly aka headers) for them, so you never see them.

There does, however, remain one catch.  PAN doesn't automatically apply
this filter retroactively.  Therefore, in the rules dialog, select your
new ignored rule, and hit the "Apply to Subscribed Groups" button.  That
will apply the new rule retroactively to your current groups, deleting (or
marking as read, whatever you set) all ignored posts.

Do keep in mind that even so, every time you /add/ a new plonk, the rule
still applies only automatically applies to new posts, so existing posts
will be hidden, but remain as they were when the plonk was added.  To get
the ignored rule to mark as read or delete existing posts already in PAN's
database, you'll need to manually apply the rule, just as you did above,
when first creating it.

Now /that's/ an ignored setup that acts rather more how I'd expect
"ignored" to act.  If I plonk something, I don't /ever/ want to see it,
not even to refer back to it after seeing a quote from it in someone
else's post.  For those posts I just don't want to see normally, but which
I want PAN to keep around so I can refer back to them after seeing them
quoted, I use the scoring option to score the post down below zero, but
not all the way to ignored.  I have another rule set up for these, that
just marks them as read, without deleting them.  Thus, if I need to, I can
toggle the view read filter, and go back to the low-scored article to read
it.  This doesn't often happen, but it's nice being able to set "full
ignored" for some things, while only setting "don't show by default", for
others.

-- 
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