Tutorial 12: Selection, Kill, and Highlight Filters | |
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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:
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. |
Filter Scope |
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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. |
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:
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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. |
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:
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Global Info |
The global info area looks like this:
The following features are available here:
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. |
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. |
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. |
Summary |
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