Google Groups Alternative

Programs like Xnews can reformat the line lengths in quoted messages.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to 
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

On a sunny day (Fri, 03 Jan 2014 18:21:09 -0800) it happened RosemontCrest wrote in :

That is a pity, not needed, NewsFleX has a very powerful filter, just add some obvious keywords and whatever you do not want, and it will stop that and anyone replying to it. aioe works pretty good overall. I normally have all filters off, read the headers, mark what interests me, then get the articles of interest. That already eliminates 99% of crap. google's Usenet seem 100% broken, last post I could find from me was dec 31... Maybe google is over the top, who is it Larry Page?

+1

Agent isn't a very good email program, though, so I use both. I used Gravity for a long time but since it's no longer supported I moved to Agent. Gravity was better at managing binaries and a few other things.

IMO, the most "missing" part of any NNTP client is a good content filter. One that is easily trainable (expecting folks to write AND TEST regex's for every conceivable "insult" is a silly way to design a user interface).

I started developing a plugin for Tbird that applies several ad hoc mechanisms to classify posts -- much the same way that anti-spam software works (Bayesian filters, critical header parsing, etc.).

NNTP traffic is different beast than SMTP -- you have to pull down the message content if you actually want to *examine* the content. So, that filtering aspect has a much higher *added* cost than SMTP content filtering (where you already *have* the content available).

[OTOH, the days of paying per megabyte of traffic are behind us (?)]

So, as an expedient, where possible, I have the agent use the knowledge gained from the filters to rewrite more traditional filters -- e.g., regex's on the normal headers available *before* content is pulled down. This makes it easy to get rid of the folks who like to change their posting address (easy to block with a traditional filter but you would have to build that filter manually), or folks who the filter has "scored" as generating a high percentage of "unacceptable" posts (lots of profanity, high political content, etc.).

The other big difference between SMTP and NNTP filtering is the user tends to be more willing to tolerate false positives in an NNTP filter than he/she would in an SMTP filter! (if a new post never appears, you tend not to "miss" it; OTOH, an email that gets diverted can have consequences!)

So far, I've been happy with my hacked together implementation. :> But, haven't yet had the time to engineer the GUI portion of a proper interface -- nor learn how Tbird plugins are built. Not a high priority with so much else to entertain me ;-)

[Presently, my code runs on a physical agent -- a box that "slurps" NNTP traffic, does the learning schtick and then masquerades as my regular NNTP server -- showing me only what it thinks I should see (thereby filtering out the unwanted content). I train it by pushing my "replies" at it in a specific form: "this is undesired"]

I also need to design a more tolerant "forget filter" that gradually "unlearns". Otherwise, entry to the "banned criteria" tends to be "forever". :-/

You can rewrap lines with [ctrl]-r or Edit-> Rewrap

--
Mike Perkins 
Video Solutions Ltd 
www.videosolutions.ltd.uk

I think my ISP is blocking this.

Now I am in Tbird, running through aioe. Now, if THIS works, does that mean my ISP is blocking ?

When google works, Tbird works. Hmmmm.

Could it be my ISP or do you all think it is another link in the chain somewhere ? It works and stops working art random it seems.

Sometimes Tbird gets confused and loses stuff. I manage that by having two newsgroup accounts (Supernews and eternal-september).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Well, so far Tbird works whehn google works. Additionally, this problem has been around, I couldn't post it. Even when Vinnie posted for me in SER it had been acting up already.

It really does seem to be an access issue, it can do it someties and then it can't. The commone denominator right now is this ISP.

I ain't typoing no more right now until I see this go through.

Take a look at this one.

This is getting ridiculous

Yes, getting a shitty mail client to sort of pretend that it is a newsreader, and annoying everyone with it is still possible.

But you really should consider "option B": installing an actual newsreader.

--
Music DIY Mailing List: http://www.kylheku.com/diy 
ADA MP-1 Mailing List:  http://www.kylheku.com/mp1