Filters (again)

Moderation prevents trolls even without requiring real names.

i

And they were fine posts, too. All about guns. Well, a little about Norway. It should have been 15, but I guess I stepped on the moderator's toe, or something with one of my calmer comments.

Steve

If you say so.

Laurie Forbes on Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:35:15

-0600 typed >> >>>> Atta Girl, Laurie. Insult the group, then ask for help.

Thread drift; like the poor and end times, will be with us always. Cats, women, and Usenet threads will do as they please, and dogs, men and the overly rigid will have to just accept those facts.

Speaking of filters, does anyone have any comments about replacing the OEM paper air filters with those K&N Replacement Air Filters kits?

tschus pyotr

I think that used to be a high one day posting on fido.firearms back in the day, and many comments were from guys who had experience, not just theory. The guys are still out there, but scattered on different forums now.

RWL

They're great when you run WFO all the time. Otherwise, they're a bit pricy.

-- [Television is] the triumph of machine over people. -- Fred Allen

[ ... ]

Filtering out the crossposted messages is a good start. However, there are people who start them here alone -- and others who respond while limiting the "Newsgroups: " header to just here, so a thread which was blocked suddenly appears past my filters.

After crossposting -- there are individuals who are best filtered out.

And -- because people *respond* to those individuals, you have to add "Subject: " based filters for a period. Since my system allows them to expire after a specified time -- I usually use some multiple of

30 days -- depending on how long I think it is likely to continue. And some words in the "Subject: " header get a "forever" setting.

Some people try marking off topic threads with "OT: ", which would be fine to filter on -- *except* that Outlook express (and perhaps some other programs) makes the assumption that any two letters followed by a colon at the beginning of a "Subject: " header is "Re: " in some language or other -- and strips it off, replacing it with a single "Re: ". So -- again, a thread which was being blocked suddenly appears. If you put something like "[OT]" (with the square brackets) -- *that* will stick around and continue to work.

That is standard for *any* proper newsreader. It does not take effect only locally -- but instead sends out a "cancel"message which causes the article to disappear from news servers around the world. It is intended for the "Opps! I should not have sent that!" situations. Except that it is possible to forge cancels, and many news servers refuse to honor them as a result. Add to that -- your cancel message is chasing the original message, so it will appear for some period of time on all servers around the world -- and if there is a gateway to mailing lists (and I suspect to Google's archive as well), those are not news severs, and they will not (or cannot) honor the cancels.

There is an exception to the "Only the author can cancel a message" rule. The administrator of the originating news server can also do so -- to deal with problems created by a rogue user on his system.

Enjoy, DoN.

[ ... ]

That should be accomplished by marking them as "read", which is what filtering does as well. It really is not the same as deleting a message. And likely Thunderbird is assuming that "Delete" means "Cancel", so you can only do *that* for your own messages. It must have some other term for what you really want -- and it may be "mark as read".

Note that a cross-posted message, with a normal newsreader and a normal news server, should vanish (be marked as read) in all the cross-posted newsgroups as seen by *you* and you only. This is so you don't get presented the same message in all the newsgroups -- if you read all of them. (It does this by keeping a record of the "Message-ID: " of each article you read -- and forgets them after a period, so if something gets re-posted (by perhaps restoring a crashed news server from a backup), you will see it again if it is past the time that your newsreader saves that information.

Enjoy, DoN.

The problem is "crossposting". He wants to limit his newsreader to displaying only those which have *only* "rec.crafts.metalworking" in the "Newsgroups: " header. It is a fairly good bet that the more newsgroups in the header, the more off-topic it will be. Crossposting has multiple newsgroup names separated only by commas, and with a single newsgroup, there will be no commas. Good newsreaders have the ability to filter on the contents of the "Newsgroups: " header, among others. (I'm also using the "NNTP-Posting-Host: " header to eliminate spam from various countries which never submit on-topic articles.)

OBTW -- perhaps the problem is in Laurie's use of the filters that he is asking to "Delete" instead of "Mark as read". Since he can't "delete" (cancel is the offical NNTP term) things which he has not posted -- and is unlikely to be trying to get rid of his own articles. So -- look for the term which means "mark as read" in the filters and try again.

Enjoy, DoN.

Gunner Asch on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:09:26 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

For me, it isn't the upkeep, but the initial cost. "I can't afford to be 'cost effective'." Which is why I spent four days replacing a clutch. Now if I could just get some range time "cheaper than therapy!"

I am using the "delete" action for certain non-RCMs in "Newsgroups" plus one or two individuals in "From" and it works (I don't know exactly what happens to those messages but they do not show up on my screen). As I mentioned b/f, the problem now is that a lot of OT stuff still shows up in RCM only but the problem is now at least much reduced.

BTW, a moderated RCM would be a fine thing IMO. There is such a wealth of knowledge available here it seems a shame to diminish and degrade it.

Laurie Forbes

Laurie Forbes

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

It depends on what your newsreader does when asked to "delete". From some of the discussion, it seemed that some were taking that to be a "cancel" request, which can only be done by either the original poster, or the newserver administrator on the server from which it was posted.

If your newsreader it taking "delete" to mean ""mark as read", then find.

Yes.

FWIW -- my scorefile in slrn has 4318 lines, including explicit blocking of specific newsgroups in cross-postings, NNTP address ranges for various spamers -- including the one for tonight which was a "Make-Money-Fast" scam in Portuguese from Brazil, and lots of individual posters, plus "Subject: " headers (or partial "Subject: " headers, keywords to block. Many of the "Subject: " header ones are designed to go away automatically after a certain number of months. Most of the usernames are there forever.

It would be, indeed, with two problems:

1) It is a *major* task to convert an existing unmoderated newsgroup to a moderated one. (And when this newsgroup was formed, it was not obvious that moderation would be desirable.) 2) Finding (and keeping) a moderator can be another problem. Ideally, several moderators to share the load, and to allow one moderator to die or get a major stroke or something similar without losing the ability for *anyone* to post to the newsgroup.

Now -- forming it as a moderated newsgroup in the "alt" heirarchy (say alt.crafts.metalworking.moderated) would be easier.

There is (or used to be, I haven't checked in years) at least one there, "alt.hackers" -- with *no* moderator. The only way to post to it is to be able to forge the authorization that a moderator would add. However, if we had something like this, it would motivate the trolls to figure out how to do that forging. :-(

Enjoy, DoN.