Re: GNOME: Newsreader development

[Benedikt Heinen <Benedikt Heinen infrasys ascom ch>]

Hi Greg,

  I've got some "additions" to your wish/TODO-list for the newsreader, which I
state here for discussion:


  In general, I'd tend to base this on nn... But - that's a personal
preference; start off, with whatever you like.



> * Scoring/Kill files

  This should have two features:

	A) Intelligent-Kill-Sender

	   If a kill is based on a From:-Address, it should take note of
	   the according message IDs and also kill all followups to that
	   particular message. [If I don't want to see a guy flaming 
	   around, I am also 99%-certain not interested in the follow-up
	   flames he causes].

	B) Auto-Add-Subject-to-Killfile

	   If I completely ignore a certain subject in a newsgroup, the 
	   newsreader should temporarily (say, for 10-14 days) add this
	   subject to the kill file. [If I don't care about "How to cook
	   a cat" in comp.lang.c++ today, chances are high, I don't want
	   to see it there tomorrow either...] -- a nice thing here, would
	   be killing the thread on a message-id basis.



> * Encourage good netizenship
>     + Ensure that important information isn't obscured, such as followup
>       and newsgroup lines.
>     + Instead of giving the standard
> 
>          #-----------------------------------#
>          # Sure ya wanna post? [ok] [cancel] #
>          #-----------------------------------#
> 
>       dialog all the time, it should include warnings when appropriate:
> 
>          #-----------------------------------------------------------------#
>          # Your followup post is being sent to the following newsgroups in #
>          # addition to comp.os.linux.misc                                  #
>          #    comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy                                  #
>          #    comp.os.next.advocacy                                        #
>          #    alt.fan.warlord                                              #
>          #                                                                 #
>          # Your .signature file is over 4 lines long                       #
>          #                                                                 #
>          # Sure ya wanna post? [ok] [cancel]                               #
>          #-----------------------------------------------------------------#

A couple of years back, I saw a good feature in a Fidonet newsreader called
"Yuppie" (written by a group of German programmers). That "enforced" good
netizenship not just by saying "Your .sig is over 4 lines long? [ok]
[cancel]", but rather if the newsreader noticed something rather strange, it
came up with a box like:

	+---------------------------------------------------------------+
	|								|
	|  Your article consists of more than 50% quoted text.		|
	|								|
	|  If you want to post the article as-is, please press "h".	|
	|  Press ESC to cancel the article.				|
	|								|
	+---------------------------------------------------------------+

The "confirm" key in this case is a random character or number, changing
every time. That way you definately had to willingly acknowledge the alert.
They used this kind of confirmation only on parts requiring good netizenship,
not on functions like "Quit program"...

The local newsgroups of the city, where the programmers are located was
probably one with the best netizenship about, as the most common newsreader
was Yuppie and that "forced" people to either behave (easy) or constantly hit
different keys to acknowledge his/her own bad netizenship (annoying)...

That was definetely something I found very useful, as the more experienced
user will probably no longer see such an alert after a couple of days use, and
the starting user will slowly be trained to "behave"...



  Benedikt

Windows 95: n.
    32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit
    operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor,  written
         by a 2-bit company that can't stand for 1 bit of competition.