Re: [Pan-users] I goofed, royally

[Duncan]

Beartooth posted on Mon, 02 Sep 2013 17:34:21 +0000 as excerpted:


> I think I fixed it, thanks to one of your clues.

=:^)

> On re-reading, your mention of ~/.pan2/Score enlightened me. I
> went there, and found two entries at the bottom that lacked the format
> of the rest. (One was essentially the four lines above, and the other
> something I had bungled while trying to get out of my own trap.)
> 
> Then I closed and re-opened Pan, and the "-9999"s were all gone.

OK.  So I learned something out of this as well. =:^)

While pan does indeed check ~/News/Score if it finds it, it apparently 
simply imports that to its own ~/.pan2/Score file.  I wasn't sure on that 
before, but if you wrote to the News location and it ended up in the .pan2 
location, that must be it.

Very good to know.  While I don't use the News location myself, it's 
likely to be helpful the next time something like this comes up on the 
list/group.

> Of course, there is still no Eternal September filter in there to
> block posts from google-groupers. I presume it would put something
> between %BOS and %EOS, each on its own line. But what that something
> should be (or should carefully exclude -- "created by Pan" maybe?) is
> still beyond me. To Redmond with it.

Well, any line starting with % is a comment and isn't parsed as an actual 
part of a rule by pan at all.  It simply adds helpful comments (in the 
form of the %BOS, %EOS lines) of its own, when you create scores using 
pan's GUI.

So you could simply delete all the %whatever lines and the scores would 
work exactly the same.  In fact, that's pretty much exactly what I've 
done, here.  Except that for expiring score rules, I do tend to keep the 
comment line with the creation date.  But in most cases, when I killfile/
ignore or otherwise add a score, I do so permanently, adding it to an 
existing [whatever] newsgroup score section, without all the extra 
comment lines.

But that's advanced-use direct-scorefile-editing, not for people who 
prefer pan's GUI method of score entry.

And you're probably better off simply sticking with the GUI scoring 
method, since it seems to work best for you.

And by the GUI method, the folowing should do what you want to do, except 
that you can't create scores on message-id directly via GUI, you have to 
create one using references, and then go in and edit the scorefile to 
change References to Message-ID.

* I've broken it down so each line in the dialog is a separate step, with
-> indicating a different component of the same line:

1) Article menu, add a scoring rule.

2) Group name

-> contains

-> .

(In the dropdown, choose "is" to "contains".  Then simply put a single 
dot in the textbox.  This should match all groups since it'd be a strange 
group name indeed that didn't contain even a single dot-separater.  Note 
that this won't create the exact same [*] entry as suggested in the 
twovoyagers link, but it should do what we want it to do anyway.)

3) and

-> References

-> contains

-> googlegroups

(Change "subject" to "references", which should automatically change "is" 
to "contains".  Delete the existing content of the textbox and replace it 
with "googlegroups".)

4) -> set the article's score to

-> -9999

(In the dropdown, change "increase the article's score by" to "set the 
article's score to", then in the textbox, delete the 100 and replace it 
with -9999.)

5) -> forever

(In the dropdown, change "for the next month" to "forever".)

6) Add.

(Hit the add button.)

7) Now, close pan and open ~/.pan2/Score in your text-editor of choice.

8) Find the just-added rule and...

9) Change the "References: googlegroups" line to:

Message-ID: googlegroups

10) Save the file and close the text-editor.

11) Reopen pan and check to see that it's doing what you expect.

12) (Optional)  Close pan and reopen the scorefile in the text editor.  
Add the Message-ID line for webtv if you wish, or try other tweaks as 
desired.  Repeat steps 10 thru 12 as often as you like for further tweaks.


Meanwhile, is webtv even around any more?  I'd guess the product is 
defunct by now.  Actually... <wikipedia-ing>...

>From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

>>>>>

MSN TV (formerly WebTV)

...

On July 1, 2013, an email was sent out to customers that the service will 
be shutting down on September 30, 2013, and customer service will be 
available until January 15, 2014.

<<<<<

Apparently they haven't been selling new adapter hardware for some time 
but the service has continued for existing customers.  There's a 
reference to the MSN TV: Closure FAQ.

So I'd recommend not even bothering with the webtv entry, as it's either 
already obsolete (if MSN updated the message-ids to msntv or some such), 
or in any case will be by the end of this month, when the service shuts 
down.

-- 
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