slrn: scoring

This document is based on one found in the slrn distribution; see the credits section at the bottom of this page.

Introduction

Slrn's threading mechanism helps you to skip discussions that you are not interested in, by grouping together articles on the same topic in the thread selection menu. In many newsgroups, you can efficiently scan the thread selection menu for the discussions you want to read, read them, and then junk everything else with the c command.

However, some newsgroups carry so much traffic that even scanning the thread selector is time-consuming. Slrn provides tools to help ease the process of selecting the articles you want to read, while ignoring the ones you don't want. You can tell slrn to mark articles for you, based on criteria you specify. Then, when you enter the newsgroup, you can easily find articles which are more likely to be interesting.

Also, slrn can kill (mark as read) articles automatically according to similar criteria, so that they need not appear at all in the thread selector. This is especially useful for dealing with people who repeatedly post offensive, boring or nonsensical articles; you can make them "disappear," as far as you are concerned, or you can have them already marked as read, but still appear in the listing, in case they are somewhat interesting.

Slrn does this by "memorizing" scoring and/or killing commands in a special file which is popularly known as a scorefile. Slrn's scorefile can be divided into sections for each newsgroup, or sections for groups of newsgroups; rules can also be applied to all newsgroups.

Whenever you enter a newsgroup, slrn checks to see if you have any scoring rules which apply to that newsgroup. If you do, slrn applies the rules stored in the scorefile before displaying the article selector.

Basic Idea:

slrn awards an article points by giving it a score. If the score for the article is less than zero, the article is marked as read or killed. The purpose of the score file is to define the set of tests that an article must go through to determine the score. Although the score may be based on ANY header item, it is recommended that one stick with the following for efficiency:

Score file format:

The format of the file is very simple (see below for an explicit example). The file is divided into sections delimited by a newsgroup or newsgroups enclosed in square brackets, e.g.,

Each section consists of comment lines, empty lines or keyword lines. Only the keyword lines are meaningful and all leading whitespace is ignored. A keyword line begins with the name of the keyword followed immediately by one or two colons and one space. The rest of the line usually consists of a regular expression. The keyword may be prefixed by the `~' character to signify that the regular expression should not match the object specified by the keyword.

A group of keywords defines a test that is given to the header of the article. The `Score' keyword is used to assign a score to the header if the header passes the test. It also serves to delimit tests. The score can be any positive or negative integer. However there are two special values: 9999 and -9999. If the score for an individual test is one of these two values, any following tests are skipped and the article is simply given one of the two special values. If the numerical value of the score is prefixed by an equal sign, score processing for the header is stoped and the header will be given the score for that test.

All keywords except for `Score' and `Expires' may be prefixed by the `~' character. If the `Expires' keyword appears, it must immediately follow the `Score' keyword. The `Expires' keyword may be used to indicate that the test is no longer to be applied on the date specified by the keyword. For example,

The Lines keyword is also special. Its value is not a regular expression, rather, a simple integer. It may be used to kill articles which contain too many or too few lines. For example,

This file consists of two sections. The first section defines a set of tests applied to the news.software.readers newsgroups. The second section applies to the comp.os.linux newsgroups. The final section applies to ALL newsgroups EXCEPT misc.invest.* and misc.taxes (see below).

The first section consists of three tests. The first test applies a score of 9999 to any subject that contains the string `slrn'. The second test applies to the `From'. It says that any article from davis@space.mit.edu gets scores 9999. The third test gives a score of -9999 to any article whose subject contains the word `agent'. Since tests are applied in order, if an article contains both `slrn' and `agent', it will be given a score of 9999 since 9999 is a special score value.

The second section is more complex. It applies to the newsgroups comp.os.linux newsgroups and consists of 5 tests. The first three are simple: -10 points are given if the subject contains `swap', 20 if it contains SunOS, and 50 if the article is from someone named `Linus'. This means that if Bill@Somewhere writes an article whose subject is `Swap, Swap, Swap', the article is give -10 points. However, if the Linus writes an article with the same title, it is given -10 + 50 = 40 points. Note that the first test expires at the beginning of 1996.

The fourth test kills all articles that were cross posted to an advocay newsgroup UNLESS they were posted by Linus. Note that if a keyword begins with the `~' character, the effect of the regular expression is reversed.

The fifth test serves to filter out posts from someone@who.knows.where unless he posts about `gizmos' in one of the comp.os.development newsgroups. Again note the `~' character.

If the first chaarcter following the opening square bracket is `~', then the newsgroup or newsgroups contained in the brackets are NOT to be matched. That is, the `~' character is used to denote the boolean NOT operation.

Copyright, © 2003, Concordia University, (IITS). Author: based on "doc/score.txt" in slrn distribution, by John E. Davis Credits: Anne Bennett Maintained by: webdoc@alcor.concordia.ca Last update: 1998/07/17 -- Dana Echtner