Re: all.SCORE for agent categories

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@sunweb.ch>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Whoa.. hold up there a minute Robert.  You've used what for quite a
> while?  Can you spell this out at length for us intellectually
> challenged folks..

OK I spell it out *at length* ;-)

I have all my newsgroups under the agent (no mail groups).
This is my way of using it:

* There are a few groups where I want to download everything,
  so I have them in category 'all' with predicate 'true'.

* Some groups I only want to check if there comes something interesting
  and manually select each article to download, so they are in the
  category 'header' with predicate 'false'.  I don't use that often.

* Then there's the great majority of groups where I want to watch new
  threads coming up (using orphan scoring), increase the score of
  interesting stuff (using a macro, don't ask ;-) and have the Agent
  download all follow-up's. As this is the normal case for me I put
  them in the 'default' category with predicate 'high'. Then I go
  to the category buffer, do 's' to edit the download score rule
  and put the symbol 'file' instead of 'nil' into it.  That's it!

> Maybe describe a complete `category' and what it does.

Hope it's clear now...

I never understood what it can be good for to have two sets of scoring
rules, the ordinary ones and the download scores for the Agent.  So I
started to use ordinary score files as soon as this became possible in
Gnus.  The ordinary scoring interface is so handy, and there is (was?)
nothing like it for the Agent. I wouldn't want to use the Agent
without...  So I have that useful 'watch thread and download'
functionality and all the other Gnus Goodies (regarding scoring) which
make reading news so much more convenient for me.

> Is it just a matter of saying `file' in the right place?  How does
> gnus now what `file' you mean? Or does it automatically mean a file
> with that group name?  If so then that is not like an all.SCORE file.

I think 'file' is just a key word that triggers Gnus to do The Right
Thing, which is (for me) download all articles with positive scoring.
If I'm not mistaken it respects both, the group.SCORE score file and
all.SCORE.  Just as in ordinary scoring.

Robert Epprecht