agent-score . file

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@sunweb.ch>]

Hi

I would like to share some experiences I had trying to let the Agent
use normal scoring rules for his downloading. (see Node: Category Syntax)

For people who like the 'offline' way of news reading it's fantastic.
You see a new interesting thread starting or something and just do
'I r r t' or the like and the Agent takes care that you will find the
messages downloaded. It's great!

But then, not quite: Sometimes it suddenly stops working and I can't
see why. Sometimes it happens just in one group, and sometimes in all
of them. I have tried to track it down for several weeks now, to be
able to report it here, but still do not understand what's happening.
Is there anybody else using it?

I have (agent-score . file) in the group parameters. I don't edit my
score files by hand (normally), but only with the interface that gnus
gives me ('I a s p' and the like). I don't think I do any scoring, that
the Agent does not understand (and the manual says, it would be skipped
anyway...). Or does the orphan rule give any problems?

While it is working great half of the time, it stops to do so every now
and then. The messages are still scored like they should be, but the
Agent does not download them. I couldn't figure out any difference
between groups where it is working and those, that stopped working.
I need some advice what to try next.

My ISP's news server is not very stable. Could be, that the problems
I see originate there. But even then, I would like to see Gnus and
the Agent recover better after problems like a news server breaking
down during transmission and the like.

BTW: Shouldn't the Agent also see the all.SCORE file? It does not seem
to do so.

Is it possible to put '(agent-score . file)' in the topics parameter?
I was not able to do it this way.

Robert Epprecht