[Pan-users] Re: Hi All

[Duncan]

Steve Lombardi posted
<address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Wed, 25 Feb 2004 19:10:58 -0500:

> I was wondering if there are any examples or documentation on the syntax
> of the pan score file?
> 
> I used to use Xnews on Windows, and one thing I liked was the ability to
> quickly edit its score file to filter out all the chaff in my groups.
> 
> Any tips would be appreciated.  Thanks. ---

Documentation is the biggest lack of PAN, unfortunately. The score file is
supposed to be compatible with other news reader's score files including
(I thought) xnews.  I would have therefore thought you would have
recognized the general format if you'd taken a look at it.

Anyway..  It seemed fairly self explanatory to me.. 

1)  Lines starting with % are comments.  PAN puts in a bunch of BOS/EOS
(beginning/end of score) comments, dates, and a bunch of other stuff you
can delete if desired with no ill effects or change of the way the scores
actually work.  Other commented lines include additional info about the
post that was used to generate the score, in case the user wishes to
uncomment and modify them to change the way the score works.  Again, these
can be deleted without issue if desired, making the file more concise.

2)  As with many things *ix originated, PAN makes heavy use of regular
expressions.  Understand the basics of these and you understand a lot
about PAN and how both its filters and score files work.  Fail to
understand even the basics of regular expressions, and your ability to
create effective filters AND scores just dropped thru the floor.  However,
again, I've gathered that other common score file implementations are
similar and therefore use regexs, so you should have at least a passing
familiarity with them already, I'd guess, even if you're a recent MSWormOS
user just switched, or even still using it currently, since there's an
MSWormOS PAN now.

3)  The lines enclosed in [] are the actual beginning of score demarkers,
with the enclosed content being a regular expression for the group or
groups the score applies to.

4)  The unindented score lines specify a score exactly if set to equal, or
add the score (positive or negative) to the current score if the equal
sign is missing and the score matches.

5)  Additional indented lines are score criteria, again, using regexs.

About the only additional thing to know that may be different than other
implementations is that PAN only scores on items in the overview, thus,
available before the actual post is d/led.  Unfortunately, there's no way
to filter or score based on non-overview headers (such as organization or
x-newreader or the body itself.  That's another one of PAN's big
shortcomings, and one reason one may wish to use something else in text
groups where PAN's binary attachment, multiple d/l thread, and yenc
decoding aren't as important as good filter/scoring might be.

Like I said, other than the last point on overview only, anyway, it should
be fairly self explanatory. 

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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