David WE Roberts posted on Fri, 21 Feb 2014 10:15:52 +0000 as excerpted: > Thanks - my personal view is that the GUI should remove the need to > modify the score file directly apart from advanced users. Ignoring > someone who posts to a watched thread doesn't seem that advanced.
Actually, the way watching and ignoring works, that's integral to definition of watched/ignored, so it's not /just/ the GUI, altho the GUI contributes to the issue as it's not as flexible as direct-editing. But a lack of understanding of the mechanisms and definitions involved is the real problem. And direct-editing is /always/ going to allow finer control. It's the nature of the beast, particularly with advanced functionality such as scoring that no GUI can fully cover, without being even more complicated than simply editing the file manually. How pan scoring works is like this: Normal scoring is relative: Each score adds or subtracts X scoring points on the article, and in the absence of an absolute score, the end score is simply the sum of all those additions and subtractions. Thus, by normal scoring, you could say any post in this particular thread gets a +9999 (which by itself equates to watched), while this particular poster gets a -9999 (which by itself equates to ignored). If said poster posts to that thread, the two would cancel out and (lacking any other applicable scores) said poster's posts to the watched thread would thus come thru as simply zero-scored -- normal posts. But of course relative scoring allows you the flexibility of defining that poster's negative score to say -99999 (another nine) instead, if you REALLY hate that poster's posts THAT much, thus overriding a whole SERIES of other scores that would make normal posts watched. Or, if you wish, you could assign a -10000, by itself just one point worse than ignored, so that a single watched would still leave it negative scored (-1, not ignored, but below normal), but that single watched plus just one point from some other score (say a subject line score, for example) would bring it back to zero/normal, and a watched plus just two points would bring it back positive (barely, +1). *BUT*... There's also absolute scores, and as implemented in pan's GUI, that's exactly what watched/ignored actually use, =9999 for watched, =-9999 for ignored. The way absolute scoring works is that when pan sees one of those, it immediately sets that as the score, regardless of any previous relative score, and stops processing further scoring for that article. So the first absolute score that matches always applies. And since new scores are always appended to the file, a previously existing ignored (=-9999) when a thread is watched (=9999) will always appear first in the file and thus those posts will always be ignored, since if the previously existing ignored matches, pan will never get to the later watched for the thread for that post. But if you watch a thread, THEN try to ignore a poster who happens to post IN that thread, the absolute watched (=9999) score will appear before the ignored (=-9999), and pan will see the =9999 first and stop processing further scoring for that post, so pan will never see the =-9999 ignored score for that author, since it was added AFTER the watch-thread score. Which is why the first paragraph says it's integral to the definition of watched/ignored, since as pan's GUI defines them, they're absolute scores, the first one that matches wins and nothing further down gets processed at all. If you don't want it to work that way, the simple solution is to use relative scoring instead of the absolute scoring of pan's watched/ignored GUI. Because if you tell pan to use an absolute score, ignoring anything else further down the list, that's /exactly/ what pan does. IOW, it's a case of the computer doing /exactly/ as it was told to do, instead of what you /intended/ to tell it to do. =:^) Of course there's two ways to arrange things so pan does what you /intended/ instead. a) Edit the scorefile directly, so the absolute scores appear in the order you intend, regardless of the order you added them. Basically, prioritize your absolutes. b) EITHER using the GUI to set a relative score, OR editing the scorefile directly, change the absolute scores as necessary to get the same effect as the ranked absolutes. In this case, the GUI option would involve setting a (relative) +9999 score on the thread you intend to watch, instead of using pan's watch-thread function to set an absolute score. That way, the absolute ignored scores would be the first absolute scores pan would see, and thus the ones it would use, regardless of any other relative or absolute scores that would otherwise apply. > As with so many things, the rules engine and GUI seem to lack that final > 5% - however given the limited developer resource and the general good > functionality of Pan it is hard to grumble convincingly. One could convincingly argue that the watched-thread function should set a relative +9999 instead of an absolute =9999 for that reason. However, one could EQUALLY convincingly argue that in the presence of other relative scores (say a -100 for subject or whatever, which would take the thread back below watched, as long as nobody changed the subject so the subject score didn't apply) doing so subverts the purpose of WATCHED, to ALWAYS set it watched, absolute (tho of course with the caveat that no previous absolute score applies). IOW, you'd have people who actually use scoring for /scoring/, but still want a way to set an absolute watched thread, up in arms then. > One other thing that I think I have noticed - rules can be limited to > one month, six months or forever. > > However I have not seen that rules which have lapsed are cleared out of > the rules file. > > This may be a feature (allowing old rules to be re-activated) or a > deficiency which allows uncontrolled growth of the rules file. > > For the GUI, I would tend towards the latter. The slrn scoring functionality, which pan adopted, is simply too advanced to be properly covered in a GUI. The GUI thus gives you limited starter functionality, but the intention is clearly to simply expose some of the simplest functionality via GUI, with the GUI option to edit the scorefile itself there for those who want something more advanced. And I guess expiring scores are considered "advanced". Tho it /would/ be useful to at least have a pan option, probably found in preferences in the GUI and on by default, to delete expired scores. > Still, I am using Pan because I can't find a better alternative. Indeed. Tho on MS, I know there were quite some choices at least in the past. Forte's Agent is of course the most famous in that regard, the reference by which all others certainly must be measured. Are they no longer around? And on Linux/Unix there's other options too, including the respected gnus emacs mode and the previously mentioned slrn, altho neither one have quite the combination of both GUI mode and text AND binary functionality that pan has, which is what has kept me a loyal pan user for over a decade now. =:^) -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
