Been reading UK.D-I-Y at Google Groups for the last couple of years.
Thanks to the antics of the idiot cross-posters who appeared just before Christmas, it's now virtually unuseable.
While we wait for the EU to realise the wisdom of euthanasing these morons for the good of the species, can anyone recommened a decent newsgroup reader for Mac OS X that will filter out the chaff and get back to the real business of Andy/IMM ding-dongs about cheap power tools and land reform?
Yes, ignore the other suggestions and get MacSOUP for OSX. Stefan the author of MacSOUP posts regularly to uk.comps.sys.mac which is the place to look for all questions relating to MacOS.
The following was his announcement of the latest (beta) version. If you want to stick with the tried and tested version then that is version
2.5, but 2.6 seems to be extremely stable.
------------------------------------------------------------------ The first beta version of MacSOUP 2.6 is available.
Changes since 2.5:
- Supports SMTP authentication. - Uses the system-wide address book on Mac OS X 10.2 and later. - Address auto-completion in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields in outgoing messages. - A filter field at the top of the subject window that allows you to narrow down the list to only those articles whose author or subject contains a certain substring. - Ability to filter mail by arbitrary headers, not just the couple of predefined ones. Useful to filter mail by headers like "X-Spam-Classification:" which are added by spam filters such as POPFile or SpamBayes. - Several bug fixes and performance improvements. In particular, searching (non-regexp) has become much faster.
MacSOUP is IMO much better than any of the newsreader I have used under Windows or Unix/Linux. The kill file is particularly good and will in most cases kill the troublesme posts by simply downloading the headers - so you don't have to download the entire article in order to decide that you don't want to read it.
A few weeks ago, I noticed one of my transit peers had started refusing to relay such articles. Examination of articles in my newsspool from "news.alt.net" showed excessively long path which made me wonder if there are a lot of transit servers blocking "news.alt.net", forcing articles to take long paths around the blockages. Path lengths for "news.alt.net" seem to be shorter now, but the block I'm aware of is still in place.
Hadn't noticed that one, but "peernews.infracons.co.uk" looked like another noise source.
I haven't seen any official discussion, but it would appear that some of the transit servers have decided to stop relaying articles from leaf nodes which are mostly just noise sources.
Only if your local server takes those groups already. It would be better to kill on Newsgroups: rather than Xref:
In MacSOUP it is:
Kill on regexp "Newsgroups:.*,.*,.*," for example.
To kill anything posted to >= 4 groups.
Another useful feature in MacSOUP is Autokill, hence:
Autokill if Newsgroups contains "alt" Autokill if From contains " snipped-for-privacy@easy.com"
are useful entries since they kill not only the original post (anything cross-posted to alt.* and anything posted by IMM) but also any followup posts. This is extremely effective at rescuing uk.d-i-y from being the wasteland that it was to being a useful newsgroup.
Wasteland? Still 100's of on topic posts a day... but I have been filtering out the carp so I guess I don't know what I've been missing!
I'd put in a vote for the Newswatcher family of readers (eg YA-Newswatcher or MT-Newswatcher). I'm still using OS9 (and YA-Newswatcher) but I know that at least the MT version is OS X now, and YA may be too. Any proper Newsreader should be infinitely preferable to using Google Groups IMO.
David Micklem wrote in news:200120041315541503% snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com:
This post made me curious - during the troubles I wanted to do something about crossposts, but I couldn't work out how in Xnews, and anyhow it has an excellent one-press killfiler.
So I never did filter cross-posting, but I haven't seen any more than the usual rough trade for weeks, and I kind of like to watch that.
So is btinternet missing half the posts, I know the server is somewhat flaky by all the references to posts I never saw, though sometimes they turn up a few weeks later, my guess is that that BT retrained posties for IT.
The rubbish is certainly being carried by BT's transit peers (I have two peering connections with them). It might be that BT clean it off their normal customer facing servers -- I've never used those.
uk.d-i-y with 30 day expirey currently has 10923 in my newspool after cancels. That's 364 articles/day plus whatever is cancelled (which I can't easily work out by newgroup, and would vary widely from one newsserver to another in any case).
No idea how bad it is now - but it was annoying enough around Xmas for me to bother setting up a filter. Dumping multiply (>=5) cross-posted messages made them all instantly disappear.
ntl
Yes, that sounds about right
On the earlier question of what newsreader to use on a Mac, the following page seems to have a fairly comprehensive list, with download links and reviews...
Both MacSoup and YA/MT-NewsWatcher are highly praised - MacSOUP especially if you want/need to read offline.
I've just started trialling a free newsreader called Gravity (it's for Windows). It does that very easily and thereby kills the troublesome messages. There are so many configuration options that I'll be fiddling for while yet before deciding whether to stick with it, but haven't run up against any serious problems so far. Got mine from
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