Re: [leafnode-list] Filtering revisited.

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

tmcd@xxxxxxxx writes:

> On Fri, 8 Oct 1999, Cornelius Krasel
> <krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Newsgroups: [newsgroups glob]
> > Regex: [some arbitrary regex]
> 
> I advocate only having one syntax:
>     Newsgroups: [some arbitrary regex]
>     Regex: [some arbitrary regex]
> Less code, less to learn, regexen are more powerful, et cetera.
> 
> > Action: kill|keep|[number]
> 
> I've never used a scoring newsreader, so I don't know how they work.
> How would scoring for fetch work?  As I heard how it's used with
> newsreaders, articles are presented in order of decreasing score, but
> you see all the articles.  For fetching, that would mean that all the
> articles would be fetched anyway.  I must misunderstand -- would only
> articles with score >= 0 be fetched?

Yes.  Each article would be scored, and then only those articles whose
final score is above some minimum value (usually 0) would be
downloaded.  If you look at the documentation for `slrnpull', you can
see an example of how a newsspool manager could do article download
filtering via optional scoring.

In newsreaders, scoring is often used for two purposes.  One of them
is what you mentioned: to control the order in which articles are
presented.  Another purpose is to manage killfiles; i.e., to make the
decision as to which articles are killed and which ones aren't.  Under
this second mechanism, articles scored below some minimum value are
killed.  You can look at the documentation for Gnus to see an example
of how this can be used in a newsreader.  This is pretty much the same
way that scoring could be used to control article downloading.

One advantage to scoring is that it reduces the need for writing
expressions in the news filter consisting of complex boolean logic,
since several different parts of the scoring mechanism could add or
subtract from the accumulating score, and this could be used to create
the same effect as expressed boolean logic.

One disadvantage to scoring is that the decision as to which articles
make it or don't is sometimes hard to figure out upon inspection,
due to the fact that this decision is made on the basis of an
accumulating score value.

In other words, this advantage of scoring could also be a
disadvantage. :)

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@xxxxxxxxxx

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