Soc.Culture.Jewish Newsgroups Frequently Asked Questions and Answers URL: www.scjfaq.org/faq/01-08.html

www.scjfaq.org/faq

Question 1.8:
Some of these newsgroups have quite a bit of traffic? How do you cope with it?

There are two ways to cope with it. Some escape to moderated groups, and either never or only periodically check in with their unmoderated cousins. Others continue to "fight the good fight" in all forums. However, the comments below apply to filtering of both moderated and unmoderated newsgroups.

The approach to take depends on your particular newsreader and setup for news. Some provide kill or filtering mechanisms, and some do not. Those that do not (if this information is wrong, please inform the FAQ maintainer at maintainer@scjfaq.org) include Free Agent, the Netscape newsreader, and the web-based Deja and MailandNews readers. Most Unix-based readers provide filtering mechanisms, as does the Agent reader. [Both Agent and Free Agent are available at TUCOWS, www.tucows.com]

For most of the Unix readers, you need to use a "kill file." It's an algorithm which scans articles and eliminates those meeting criteria you specify. If you read news with "rn" or one of its offspring, you create a file News/soc/culture/jewish/KILL consisting of lines such as:

/talk.politics/h:j      # skip all articles cross-posted to talk.politics.*
/J. Random Luser/h:j    # skip all articles written by J. Random Luser
/egitimate/j            # skip all articles with "egitimate" in Subject

If you use rn, trn, or any of its varients, you can find a useful explanation of how to make a kill file in the Killfile FAQ. This is available on rtfm.mit.edu or ftp.uu.net. The URL is:

• ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/news/answers/killfile-faq

This can be retrieved by sending Email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the following line in the body of the message:

	send usenet/news.answers/killfile.faq

Other newsreaders implement this feature differently. For example, the "gnus" package from within Gnu Emacs would have a killfile like:

	(gnus-kill "Xref" "talk\\.politics")
	(gnus-kill "Author" "joe_user@site\\.com")
	(gnus-kill "Subject" "\\blegitimate\\b")
	(gnus-expunge "x")

If you use Gnus, you can find out more information on the killfile facility by typing M-x info within gnus.

If you use the newsreader nn, James Kahn wrote that you can just type K (that is, a capital K), and nn will then prompt you for various things, such as whether to kill by name or by subject, etc.

If you use a different newsreading program, you may be out of luck. In that case, your best bet is to ask someone at your local site how to create killfiles, or read the manual about your newsreading program. You might consider writing a perl script to preprocess your news for you.

The FAQ is a collection of documents that is an attempt to answer questions that are continually asked on the soc.culture.jewish family of newsgroups. It was written by cooperating laypeople from the various Judaic movements. You should not make any assumption as to accuracy and/or authoritativeness of the answers provided herein. In all cases, it is always best to consult a competent authority--your local rabbi is a good place to start.

Hopefully, the FAQ will provide the answer to your questions. If it doesn't, please drop Email to questions@scjfaq.org. The FAQ maintainer will endeavor to direct your query to an appropriate individual that can answer it. If you would like to be part of the group to which the maintainer directs questions, please drop a note to the FAQ maintainer at maintainer@scjfaq.org.

© (c) 1993-2004 Daniel P. Faigin <maintainer@scjfaq.org>