Tutorial 12: Selection, Kill, and
Highlight Filters
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Contents: Selection & Kill Filters Filter Scope
Adding & Removing Filters Combining Filters
Editing Filters Common Filter Features
Global Filter Data Filter Statistics
Author Notes Saving & Loading Filters
Summary
What are Selection, Kill, and Highlight Filters? Selection, kill, and highlight filters are used to select which articles you wish to read (or not to read) when reading a group. It's possible to make these filters group specific, or to apply them to any subset of groups, such as "*.binaries.*", or "comp.*".

Selection, kill, and highlight filters all use the same type of filters (as opposed to display filters, which are a different thing altogether). Selection filters act upon articles, returning a "yes" or "no" answer for whether a given article matches a given filter. For example, you might define a filter to match all articles that are crossposted to more than 3 groups, or a filter to match all articles that are in any thread you've posted to yourself. It is also possible to combine filters using and and or logic to form more complex queries.

There are several main uses for selection filters:

  • Subsetting groups - This allows you to define different views for looking at any group or set of groups. For example, you might define one view that shows you all the "for sale" articles in a marketplace newsgroup, and another that shows you all the "wanted to buy" posts, and yet a third that shows you articles you have posted and any followups to those articles. Any of these filters can be toggled on or off to immediately change your view of the group.

  • Killing articles. Kill filters are used to remove various postings permanently. After articles are killed, you never see them again no matter how you chose to view the group's articles. This is useful to remove "spam" type posts. For example, it's extremely unlikely that any post containing "Make Money Fast" or "$$$$" in the title is worth reading. You can define a kill filter to remove such posts.

  • Highlighting articles. You might make certain articles stand out in the article list, as in this example, in which a filter matching subject lines containing Steinway or Baldwin has been defined:


    The group reader tutorial has more information on highlight filters as well.

Since selection, kill, and highlight filters are three uses of the same types of filter, the general term Selection Filter is used in this documentation to describe them.

Proper use of selection filters can greatly increase the signal to noise ratio of usenet. NewsRog provides uncommonly powerful selection and kill filter capabilities compared to almost any other newsreader on any platform.

This section of the documentation discusses general filter topics. The specifics of each different type of filter are covered in the reference section of this documentation.

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Filter Scope Filters can be defined within the context of a particular group, in which case they apply only to that group, or they can be defined globally to apply to groups matching any particular pattern (set in the Group Patt area of the filter list). Global filters are defined in the configuration editor for NewsRog. Group specific filters are defined from within the group reader window. Generally, if a filter is to apply to more than one group (for example, to comp.*) it is best to define it once in the configuration editor instead of duplicating the filter in each group.

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Adding and Deleting Filters In each filter list there is an Add button that, when pressed, will display a popup list of available filters. Filters are plug-ins, so the list may change depending on which filters are currently installed. The popup filter list looks like this:

A filter may be added by double clicking on it's name in the popup list, or multi-selecting several filters and pressing the Insert Selected button. The list may be closed without adding a filter by clicking the Add button again or pressing the Close button in the popup list. You may add multiple filters at once by drag-selecting several and clicking the Insert Selected button. Note that you are not limited to one instance of each type of filter. You might, for example, add several Header Match filters for different purposes.

Removing filters is a simple matter of selecting those to be removed and using the Delete button.

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Combining Filters

Multiple selection filters defined in a filter list may be combined in either Any mode or All mode (which is another way of saying Or and And in boolean logic).

The lower right corner of the selection filter lists, such as the one seen above, contains a gadget which can be set to:

  • Any - An article will be matched if it is matched by any filter in the list.

  • All - An article will only be matched if it is matched by all of the filters in the list.

If there is only one filter in the list, the behavior of both options is identical. If there is more than one, you can chose how they are to be combined. You may also create composite filters using any boolean logic by using the And/Or filter.

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Editing Filters Each filter provides a user interface for customizing its operation. For example, a crosspost limiting filter might allow you to edit the maximum and minimum number of crossposts allowed in any article it matches. A header match filter might allow you to edit a list of patterns to be contained in the headers of articles it matches.

The user interface for any filter may be called up by either double clicking on the name of the filter in the filter list, or by using the Edit button. The user interface for each filter is described in detail in the reference section of this documentation.

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Common Filter Features Certain information is available in every type of selection filter. Calling up the editor for a particular filter reveals four main click tabs:

  • Filter Settings - This is where you edit information specific to this particular filter. What appears here will differ depending on the type of filter in question, and the specifics for each filter type is documented in the reference section of this documentation.

  • Global Info - This area edits data common to all types of filters, such as the filter's description.

  • Stats - This area displays certain statistics pertaining to this particular filter, such as how many articles it has matched.

  • Author Note - This area can be used to edit a longer description for this filter, useful for complex filters that you wish to share with other people. For instance, in an anti-spam filter you might describe its use and the type of spam it filters.

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Global Info The global info area looks like this:

The following features are available here:

  • The filter Description is any short string that will remind you of the purpose of this filter. Filters can be toggled on and off individually to change your view of a particular group, and this name can serve to remind you what a particular filter does.

  • The Thread ModeAll selection filters have an option to control their behavior when used to limit the set of articles shown in the article list. The setting only affects the behavior of the filter when the article list is set to show thread entry points only. In this case, there are several modes to pick from:

    • Base - A thread is shown only if the basenote of the thread matches the filter. This was the behavior of earlier verions of NewsRog.

    • Any - A thread is shown if any article in the thread matches the filter.

    • All - A thread is shown only if all articles in the thread matches the filter.

    Using this setting allows an easy way to create, for example, a filter which shows new articles, and shows threads which contain any new articles if the article list is in Threads mode. This setting does not affect other uses such as kill or highlight filters.

  • The Expire Date, if turned on, is a specific date on which this filter will expire and be deleted. This is handy for creating filters that last a certain fixed period of time (say, one month) and then disappear.

  • The Expire Disuse setting is similar, but will expire filters that have not matched anything in a certain period of time. For example, let's say you create a filter to kill all posts to a certain thread. When people stop posting to this thread after some days, weeks or months, it would be annoying to have to manually track and delete the kill filter for that thread. But with NewsRog, you can have this happen automatically. By setting this value to, say, 7 days, a filter will disappear automatically if it hasn't matched any articles in the past 7 days.

  • The Enable checkbox toggles this filter on or off. Filters that are not enabled have no effect; they simply are not used.

  • The Invert checkbox inverts the sense of the filter; all articles it would normally match are not matched, and vice versa. This way you can easily define filters that match all articles except those specified by the filter criteria.

  • The Toolbar Button option allows you to define a graphic file which will be used to create a toolbar button for this filter. This toolbar button appears in the Group Window, near the article view area, and clicking a filter's icon will toggle that filter on or off and update the list of articles accordingly.

If neither the Expire Date nor the Expire Disuse options in this area are selected, then the filter will never expire.

The filter description may also be changed by typing into the name box in a filter list when a particular filter is selected. The Enabled and Invert options may be toggled on and off from the filter list by clicking in the appropriate column of the list:

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Filter Stats Certain information about filters is tracked to enable you to easily see how filters are performing. The statistics area looks like this:

The Total History area presents a cumulative count of the number of successful and attempted matches for this filter. For example, if there are 100 articles in a group, and a particular filter matches 35 of them, then the components of the Total History area will increment by 35 and 100 respectively each time the filter is used.

The Last Use area is similar, but it resets for each use of the filter. For example, if you perform some operation in the group window's user interface that requires re-running filters, the Last Use area statistics will reset each time.

The Last Match is the date on which the filter last successfully matched any article. This is used to determine when to expire articles that use the Expire Disuse feature.

Pressing the Reset button will reset all the statistics to zero.

Pressing the Update button will update the Last Match date to today's date. This way you can "force" a filter that would have otherwise expired to start it's internal clock over, so to speak.

Some other filter statistics such as a percentage match number are available from the filter lists.

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Author Notes When sharing filters with other people, it is often useful to include a longer description of the filter so that other people can know what it does without having to experiment with it themselves. This is particularly useful for complex filters. For this reason, NewsRog allows you to type some descriptive text into an Author Note:

This text will then be displayed when the filter is loaded by another NewsRog user.

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Saving & Loading Filters Filters or groups of filters may be saved or loaded from disk files. Pressing the right mouse button above a filter list will produce a popup menu with "Save..." and "Load..." a few other options.

By selecting one filter, or multiselecting several filters in the list, and chosing the "Save..." menu, a file requester will appear asking for a filename to which the selected filters should be saved. If more than one filter is selected, all the filters will be save to the file. This way filters may be saved for future use or for sharing with other NewsRog users.

By chosing the "Load..." menu, a file requester will appear asking for a filename from which to load previously saved filters. After chosing a file, a list of the filters in the file will be displayed:

The list will present all of the filters from the file. Double clicking on a single filter will load that filter. Multi-selecting a group of filters and pressing the "Load" button will load those filters. If the filter has a Author Note, then this will be displayed when the name of the filter is clicked in the list.

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Summary By this point in the tutorial you should understand:

  • What selection, kill, and hilight filters are.
  • The difference between selection and kill filters.
  • What filter scope refers to, and the difference between global and group specific filters.
  • The logic used to combine multiple filters.
  • How to add and remove filters.
  • How to edit a particular filter's parameters.
  • How to change a filter's description.
  • How to create auto-expiring filters.
  • The difference between a set expire date and expiring after a certain period of disuse.
  • How to enable and disable filters.
  • How to invert the sense of a filter's comparison.
  • How to save and load groups of filters to disk files.
  • What statistics are tracked about filters.
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