Frank Tabor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted
[EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:56:57
+0000:
Duncan wrote:
>> ([The auto-mark-read of killed posts] feature is scheduled to be
>> added, but most likely not until after 1.0 stable
> That will be good. As I sit here, there are 10 groups showing a total
> of 100 new messages, all filtered, and now I have to go mark each group
> as read.
A bit more detail, since the subthread is headed that direction...
Charles has asked how the old rules setup was actually used. It turns
out that other than auto-expiration (particularly on groups with extreme
retention on the servers a user may be using, gmane's archive policy,
never expire, is a good example), which is handled differently now, the
main use was for actually doing stuff (download, mark-read, delete) based
on scores. He says that use is legitimate, but believes the
implementation in old-pan was too complex -- many users failed to make
use of the because they simply couldn't groke how to set it up. I agree,
as I had to explain it a number of times. Scoring itself can get
complex, so is a legitimate candidate for having to explain, particularly
with the power and complexity of regex expressions and the scorefile
format, but once scored, actually doing something besides pretty colors
with the scores can and should be rather simpler than the old
implementation.
The exact details of the new implementation of course won't be known
until it's actually done, but as discussed (with Charles approving),
automatic actions for (1) download, (2) mark read, (3) delete, would be
possible, based on the scoring level (corresponding to the color
levels). There are several ways the options might be laid out. Here's
one ([] indicates dropdown boxes, possible defaults shown):
In preferences, perhaps on an "Auto" or "Actions" tab:
Automatically:
Download posts scored at least [Watched]
Mark-read posts scored at most [Negatively]
Delete posts scored at most [Ignored]
The dropdown boxes would have the choices:
disabled/watched/high/medium/zero/negative/ignored.
I just came up with that idea as I wrote this, as a bit simpler way of
doing what was discussed. As actually discussed, the options would be
checkboxes, perhaps laid out like this:
Automatically:
Download:
x Watched
o High-scored
o Medium-scored
o Zero-scored
Mark-read:
o Zero-scored
x Negative-scored
x Ignored
Delete:
o Zero-scored
o Negative-scored
x Ignored
Of course, the other option would be to reverse that, so the dropdowns
are on the actions, for each score-level, like so:
For scores of:
Watched: [Automatically download]
High: [No automatic action]
Medium: [No automatic action]
Zero: [No automatic action]
Negative: [Automatically mark-read]
Ignored: [Automatically delete]
Or, the same but with checkboxes (I won't do a mockup of that).
Which of the above options or something else entirely is chosen, defaults
as shown or to nothing done automatically (as now), and whether it makes
sense to show all actions for all score-levels (auto-delete watched??
auto-download ignored??) for consistency if nothing else, of course
remains to be figured out at actual implementation. Naturally, I think
the idea I just came up with, the first one above, is the simplest and
makes the most sense, even if it kills a bit of flexibility (being able
to auto-download zero-scored posts, while auto-deleting watched posts,
for instance, but wow! that's non-intuitive!).
--
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
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