GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

25-12-2003, 03:12 PM

wrote:

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 16:41:36 GMT, Jim Elbrecht

-snip-

Even without crossposts- after about 30 posts threads are rarely
productive, so I just killfile them when they get too far afield.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear about that. I have an excellent
news program (Agent). I wasn't referring to seeing the
cross-posted thread in more than one newsgroup.

I was referring to the fact that cross-posting is
notoriously indulged in by trolls (as well as sometimes by
non-trolls) and cross-posted threads tend to degenerate
fairly quickly into hostility and insult-slinging with no
redeeming value -- as indeed, the one here recently did.

I understood you loud and clear. I use Agent, too. But I use
nfilter to eliminate the crossposting trolls. I have mine set to
eliminate anything crossposted to 4 or more groups. That gets 90% of
the trolls and to date [4-5 yrs of using nfilter] I've never missed a
single thread of interest. The 'kill anything crossposted to a
religious or political group filter' gets another 4% or so.

I just retrieved the new messages for this group. Agent says
there are 291 messages on my server that I haven't seen yet.

But it only downloaded 1. 289 were crossposted to more than 3
groups. 1 was *
[I just checked googlegroups to see that one. I'm taking off the
filter on to see where it pops up again. I doubt I
would have ever killfiled a whole domain over Froggy.g]

Nfilter acts like a 'pre-filter'. I still usually use Agent's
filters to manage individual groups.

Nfilter is no longer supported, but it was freeware from the gitgo. I
think Hamster will do the same thing & may still have support.

Jim