[Pan-users] Re: What is "Score"

[Duncan]

Travis posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, 
on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:22:31 -0700:

> I see a lot of discussion about "Score".  What exactly is it?
> 
> If it matters I use the Windows version of Pan and only for 
> downloading DVD's.

Think of scores as "fuzzy" kill or watch filters.  Actually, the kill and
watch filters are implemented as scores as well, but the idea of scores is
to allow not only kill and watch, but something beyond just "OK" in the
middle, as well, and to allow more than one factor to affect the "score"
of a post.

Suppose you have a subject you don't normally want to see any of the posts
for, while at the same time, there are certain authors you /always/ want
to see their posts, even if they are on this subject.  Or reverse that,
you normally want to prioritize everything on the subject rather high,
except for posts by certain authors.

Or, making things more complex, suppose some posts deal with two different
subjects, and you want the ultimate priority of the post to reflect the
cumulative priority (score) of both subjects, and the author.

This is easy with scores.  Rather than setting a subject or author equal
to a certain score (priority), you set it /plus/ or /minus/ a certain
score, plus 100 for this, minus 200 for that, plus 5000 for something
else. The scoring app then adds all the scores up, coming up with a final
score reflecting all the scoring factors that apply to that post, added
together, +100-200+5000=4900, in this example, so the post has a score of
+4900.

Now, how do those scores translate into something useful in the PAN GUI?
Well, first of all, +9999 = watched, -9999 = ignored/killed, but there's
more than that.  PAN has multiple score "zones".  Besides watched and
ignored, there are "low" = negative score (-9998 to -1), zero (of course),
"medium" = +1 to +4999, and "high" = +5000 to +9998.  Each of these score
"zones", ignored, low, zero, medium, high, watched, can be acted upon by
PAN in four separate ways.

First and most basic, PAN has a "score" column, which will display the
final scoring result of each post (or blank if the final score is zero or
no score modifiers apply).  Naturally, one can click this column header to
sort by it, just as one can click any other column and sort by it.  So,
you can sort by scores.

Second, in PAN's preferences dialog, under colors, you can set each score
zone to a different color.  This can be very useful even if you don't do
anything else with scores.  For instance, in my ISP groups, I set posts by
anybody that works for them (newsmaster, several techs) to watched (+9999)
so they turn one color and I see them right away.  Those users that I
consider very knowledgeable, generally those that participate in the Unix
group and have demonstrated a very high "SNR" (signal to noise ratio, that
is, most of their posts contain useful information, few or none of them
are simply flames or otherwise entirely lacking content I find useful),
I set to +5000 (high).  Other users I want to pay particular attention to
I set to +100 or +200 (medium).  Posts from users I don't want to /ever/
see, period, their SNR is almost zero (almost everything they post is
flames or otherwise not useful) I mark ignored (-9999, see below for how
I manage these). Then, there are some I don't /normally/ want to see, but
it's conceivable I might want to see their posts on certain subjects or be
able to go back and read them if there's a particularly interesting reply
that quotes them and I want to see the entire post the quote was excerpted
from.  These posters get a -100 (low, again, see below for how these are
managed) score assigned. Everyone else gets a zero (normal) score.  Now,
each scoring zone means something, and because I've set different colors
for each, I can tell them apart at a glance.

Third and slightly more complicated to set up, one can set up filters to
act on each score zone, and further, set up rules to act on those filters.
You've probably seen me post instructions for setting up a "delete" action
for ignored, and a "mark read" action for low (negative) scores, so I
won't detail it here.  The trick to remember on filters for
negative/ignored scoring, is that you have to initially set the /opposite/
of what you want (that is, set score is at least low, to match ignored,
score is at least zero, to match low), then add the filter element to the
list, /then/ select it and hit invert, to get what you /really/ want.  Of
course, to match above zero, the invert step isn't necessary.

Here, I set a filter and rule to delete "ignored" posts, and another to
"mark read" low/negative-scored posts.  I don't set, but some would find
it very useful to set, auto-download rules for "watched" posts, and
possibly for medium and high scored posts as well.  

If one did set auto-download for watched, and set the ignored and low
rules as suggested as well, the final setup would then correspond to this:

* Ignored posts would be auto-deleted.  In ordered to see these, one would
have to re-download all overviews, with the rule to delete turned off. 
Thus, one would ONLY set ignored (or only set a delete rule on ignored)
for stuff they are sure they NEVER want to see, even if there's an
interesting reply quoting said ignored post.  This works best for spammers
and constant/deliberate trolls/flamers.

* Low-scored posts would be auto-marked-read.  As mentioned above (and
assuming one normally has the view read posts filter toggled off, so they
aren't displayed), this hides negative-scored posts by default, but still
allows one to go back and read it if desired/necessary, by toggling the
view marked read display filter to SHOW such posts, after which such posts
would show up very well, since they'd be marked with a unique color.

* Note that the above ignored delete, and negative-score marked read
rules take care of the frustrating "PAN says there are unread posts
but I can't see them" problem.  Ignored posts would be deleted, so not
show up at all.  Low (neg-scored) posts would show up in the total count,
but not in the unread count, since they'd be auto-marked-read.

* Zero-scored posts would show up as normal.

* Medium-scored posts would be displayed in their own unique color (as
explained above).

* High-scored posts would show up in a different unique color.

* Watched posts would show up in a third unique color, with the
auto-download rule further causing them to be downloaded automatically. 
(This auto-download is the only part I don't have implemented here,
because it doesn't fit my usage patterns, and because I have broadband and
am talking about text posts anyway, so click-to-download is fine. 
However, watched posts still show up in their own unique color.)

Fourth, PAN's display filters allow one to toggle score zone display by
priority.  I never use this, since I use the rules and colors thing to do
the processing I need, but conceivably, if one were pressed for time, one
could set the display filter to ONLY display watched (or watched and high,
or anything above zero, so watched high and medium) posts, and process
them, leaving the others untouched to process later.

Overall, scoring can be a /very/ useful feature.  However, given all that,
if I had my choice, I'd /still/ take only black/white yes/no filtering,
if it were flexible enough to allow filtering on the entire post (vs.
PAN's only filtering and scoring overview information, not non-overview
headers, or the post body). over PAN's scoring, but ONLY on information
available in the overview.  Yes, acting on information NOT in the overview
means the post must be downloaded first, but with a broadband connection,
or even without, that's still better than having to manually go sort thru
the posts, deleting what we don't want to deal with, when the process
/could/ have been automated, if ONLY PAN had a way to filter or score on
information not in the overview.

So, yes, scoring is a neat and useful feature, but I'd /rather/ the time
spent implementing it had gone into implementing non-overview header and
body filtering, instead.  However, I'm not the developer, Charles is, and
unfortunately, I'm not developer enough to offer a patch to add
non-overview scoring or at least filtering, so I'll take what PAN offers. 
It's still better than most other news readers I could be using.  (That
with the qualification that I now use klibido for binary downloading,
since PAN can't handle automated multi-server yet, and klibido doesn't
have the memory issues PAN does on million-overview groups.  On MSWormOS,
I'd suggest looking into BNR2/BNR3 for the same but better binary
functionality.  I now use PAN for my text groups, including this one, only.)

-- 
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