Re: [Pan-users] Kill files

[mick]

Thank you Duncan for providing a lot of useful information about scoring.

mick

-----Original Message-----
From: Pan-users [mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Duncan
Sent: 25 April 2017 08:41
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Pan-users] Kill files

Dieter Britz posted on Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:00:15 +0200 as excerpted:

> People talk about setting up a kill file for posters to news groups 
> that annoy others, by off topic postings etc. Is it possible to do 
> that with pan?

This repeats the same idea as the replies by HH, DG and Pedro in the other
subthread, but with a bit more explanation of what pan's actually doing and
why, and why it's like binary-choice killfiling (killfiled or
not) but better. =:^)

First, let's understand the difference between a fine-grained scoring
mechanism like pan has, where if desired the effects of many scoring rules
can be applied together to arrive at a final score for a post, which then
can be used to apply some action (like simply hiding the post, or marking it
read, or deleting it, or on the other end, hilighting it with various colors
depending on how high it scores, or automatically downloading the post to
cache, or saving its attachments), vs a hard binary or trinary filter
mechanism, which will act immediately on the first filter that applies to
either kill (generally hide and mark-read, sometimes delete, depending on
the implementation) or not, possibly (the trinary case) with the addition of
a watch flag (and perhaps auto- download depending on implementation) if the
post isn't killed.