[Pan-users] Re: Group-preferences: excluding a news server?

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 25 Mar 2007
02:15:09 +0000:

> Just one example:  alt.binaries.pictures.animals is not carried by the
> gmane.org news server, but every time I fire up pan, the gmane.org
> server is queried for new headers for it and many other groups I follow.
> 
> Wouldn't it be more fair to gmane.org if I could tell pan not to pester
> the gmane server for pictures of animals or mp3 files?

Actually, unless I'm extremely mistaken, the above is incorrect (unless 
you've hand-edited pan's config and screwed it up to do so, see my just-
posted reply to the other thread you mentioned).  Normally, pan will 
download a list of newsgroups from a newly configured server, and only 
check groups found in that list for that server.  Since gmane (using your 
example) doesn't carry normal newsgroups, and doesn't list them in the 
list pan downloaded when the server was configured or when it's updated, 
pan won't check for headers in normal newsgroups on the gmane server, 
only on ones that list those groups as actually being carried.

At least that's the way I've observed it working here.  I don't have pan 
set to connect until I tell it to download something, and if I only have 
it download overviews (incorrectly aka headers) from a group on one 
server, that's the only connections it opens -- it'll leave connections 
to the other servers closed until I download headers from groups on those 
servers.  Same with posts; pan only attempts to download them from 
servers carrying the group in question.  (I'm not sure if it goes from 
overviews only, or if it'll try by msg-ID even if the post isn't listed 
in the overviews for that server, as long as the group is carried.)

-- 
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