In message , at 18:13:47 on Sun, 26
Feb 2006, Flower Bobdew wibbled
In article , Janet Tweedy
writes

I go to the bottom of them, select all, scanning quickly every title
in case a short proper message is there, then just remove. Easy with
Turnpike.

Indeed. I was just hoping there was a way of avoiding downloading them.
[Besides switching news supplier.]

To kill locally, you do need to download at least the headers.

I've just asked in the TP newsgroup and there isn't really a catch-all
based on the headers available. Aside from utilising the
"/^X\-Complaints\-To: /h" which appears with each batch.

/news\.rcn\.net/h is a little quicker for Turnpike - shorter match (I've
posted that rule into the Turnpike group as well).

With a little more digging, unless or until they move to injecting
elsewhere, the combination of 3 reject rules

/news\.rcn\.net/h
/0wned/h
/Koi\-lo:/h

That's a zero in 0wned not a capital 'O'.

would kill everything so far in Turnpike (and the 2nd one may have
longer term potential) but not, AFAICS looking at the last 6 months
of urg, killing posts from one of your regulars.


Another useful one I forgot to mention in the post I made ^somewhere
up there is killling (in TP at least) on crossposting (though not useful
for the current floods). People using other news readers that can kill
on any header may find this useful as well.

/^Newsgroups:.*,/h - kills anything crossposted
/^Newsgroups:.*,.*,/h - kills anything crossposted to more than 2 groups

Add as many additional .*, as preferred, one additional newsgroup in the
crossposted article per extra .*,

[notes for converting to other news readers]
/^ start of header line
..*, match any characters followed by the , needed for the Newsgroups
line if there is more than one group the post should appear in.
/h apply the rule to a header

[You can use TP's Connect window to see the obvious impending
avalanche, stop the download, sample a header, and then reconnect.]

It's really the only solution long term with any news software that will
allow killing on any of the headers. Easier with floods of a large
number than someone who posts a hundred and regularly morphs. Be aware
of the law of unintended consequences - choose something unique to the
flood posts - the nntp-posting-host in the headers, if there is one, is
helpful in this respect.

Not sure about other newsreaders. Doesn't take more than a couple of
seconds.

As I said, its only been particularly annoying here because I'm still
on standard snail-up. When I switch to a broadband connection soon
it'll become nothing more than a minor irritation.

You get a small hit on time when using killrules for any local software
as you have to download the headers first[1], match them to rules then
get the body of those not killed but it's less of a hit than downloading
all the bodies as soon as you get to somewhere between 50 and 100 that
need killing when on snail-up.

[1] Only if you kill on Message-ID: of their post and don't use Newnews
do you not have to download all the headers, it's only useful though if
the someone you want to kill has a unique Message-ID.

Hope that little lot's of a bit of use.
--
Pedt
uk.announce ~ moderated group to announce news / events of specific interest to
a wider uk.* readership than the group(s) which their subjects would naturally
place them. See charter at http://www.usenet.org.uk/uk.announce.html