Nearly worn out my mouse.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Deleting all the rubbish on here.

[Richard]

Learn how to navigate with keys.

[NY]

I seem to go through mice at an alarming rate: the left-click button stops working properly - usually the button needs to be pressed more firmly, even though the button has clicked, maybe because the micro-switch inside has moved downwards slightly. Older mice could be opened up and cleaned or the switch mounting packed with something, but modern mice are sealed with no obvious screws.

[Jamesy]

I don't bother to delete it or filter it out, just don't click on them when reading posts.

Very obvious which ones are the turds.

[John Rumm]

My MS intellimouse has a date of 11/2001 on it... Still working well! (I have had to replace the matching KB I got at the same time though)

[The Other John]

I've just had to replace my MS Intellimouse after about 10 years as the scroll wheel has recently gone all sticky and squashy.

[NY]

Mice seem to last a couple of years with me. Maybe I've got a heavy left finger ;-)

I don't *see* it moving but there are occasions when I feel the button click mechanically, as usual, but there's no left-click action registered. If I press again a little harder, the click is registered. It suggests that the mechanical part of the microswitch is actuating even though the contacts are not closing. I'm surmising that the outer button that you press is not pressing the little tit on the microswitch quite as far as normal because the switch has shifted downwards in its housing, but that's a guess. It's happened to various Dell and Logitech mice. Some of them may be 10 or more years old, but my latest wireless mouse/keyboard (Logitech Silent Touch, Mouse M220) is starting to show signs of it and it's either a few months old or else a year and a few months old (depending on which birthday I got it for!). Either the mouse/transceiver wireless connection is getting intermittent or else the microswitch is going the same way as others in the past.

As far as I remember, the only reason I've had to replace mice in the past is failure (or rather unreliability) of the left button - apart from one cable-connected one where the outer sheath cracked and one of the wires then failed because I was too lazy to wrap the sheath in tape to protect the wires inside from "repetitive strain injury" snapping one strand after another.

[Paul]

You have the option of setting up a proxy server on your machine, which will pull the messages to a local spool, then using the filter capability the server software comes with.

Then, your "client" would be pulling messages from 127.0.0.1:119 and as long as you'd done a good job of cleaning the spool on your proxy, no more mouse clicking for delete would be needed.

This is what you'd do, if you had a favourite client and it lacked the specificity required for modern USENET.

You can also write a filter that post-processes the group. Pull in message headers first, go offline, run filter, go back online. When I did that to Mork format files, I don't know all the details of Mork, so the only capability I had, was to rewrite the subject line on each, so it no longer attracted any attention whatsoever. Replace the line with punctuation. When you're scrolling the window, patches of that fluff do not attract visual attention.

Something Nasty To Erase

---------_-----_--_-----

Like that.

The filter I wrote, had to remove 7000 posts received in a single attack, which is why it had to be tended to. That was the series of attacks that made netfront go read-only and caused the neodome operator to shut down. Post processing filters are far from the best approach, but if you have nothing for defense, it helps a tiny bit.

If you could train a Bayesian filter with your delete clicks, at least some of the messages should train up a Bayesian really fast.

Paul

[John Rumm]

Since Dave is running a RiscOS machine, he might find a better choice of proxy by running one on a raspberry pi, and using that as his intermediate server.

[Rob Morley]

Filters take some setting up but then they just work. I bought a bag of micro-switches to repair several trackballs that I've worn out, but then I switched to touch-pads.

[RJH]

Well, a few seconds to set up if the filter is based on the message. I very rarely need to delete anything.

The Logitech M185 I use with the Windows machine is as old as I can remember. I did buy a replacement for when it broke but it's still in the box . . .

The Apple trackpads are excellent. As are their PC keyboards, credit where due etc.

[Mark Carver]

Funnily enough, yesterday afternoon being able to pan around in AutoCad suddenly stopped working . After a couple of minutes faffing around, I realised the mouse wheel depression switch had failed. I think that's the first catastrophic failure I've had with a mouse

[The Natural Philosopher]

How many broken apple keyboards do you want? ]

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've replaced the micro switch on several.

[Dave Plowman (News]

I'm using a free news provider. Or rather two. And guess they don't filter out such things as well as others. I can and do set up filters based on message and sender too. But that doesn't stop them all. They are even more clever than Wodney at getting round filters.

This keyboard - IBM style but labelled Acorn - is 1991.

[John Rumm]

But how clever is that though?

Fortunately not seen any spam for a few days now, although the filter logs show a few hundred deleted posts!