Pan Newsreader

[poptones]

Scoring is whatever you like. I don't know if you are familiar with
slashdot and their moderation system, but that's the best analogy I can
think of.

It's like this: you want to make the newsgroup as easy to use as
possible, right? So let's say I am following an MP3 group. I know what
sorts of music I like, so I put together a keyword list of my fave
artists, and tell it to score any found words +100. But it's also
possible this will be exploited by spammers, so I make another filter
to score any post less than 100 lines long -100. 

So let's say I made a filter witht the words "al cooper" (because I
like both al and alice) "pink" "floyd" and "edison." I make another
with words like "porn" and "penis" and "viagra" and all that othre crap
in it, and score these at -100. 

Now when it updates a newsgroup it will "score" each post it finds. For
example:

pink floyd - momentary lapse of reason.mp3   score:+100 (pink) +100
(floyd)
total +200

MORE PINK at my porn palace!  score +100 (pink) -100 (17 lines long)
-100 (porn)
total -100

pink - family score +100 (pink) 
total 100

If I have a favorite poster in the group I can tell it to just
automatically download everything with that nick on it (as is commonly
done with old school stuff like outlook and agent) but then we run into
that "spammer exploit" thing - it's not uncommon for spammers to rip the
nicks of popular posters. So the other rules (like less than 100 lines,
sex keywords, things like that) will help get rid of these and leave
only the "real deal" poster remaining. 

This way you can simplify the task of downloading massive posts. You
can tell pan to just get all articles with a score over x-hundred
points and sort it all out later. Or you can tell it to trash any
article modded less than zero. Or you can just ignore it. It's pretty
much whatever you want to do.


-- 
poptones