I use gnus to read mail, especially for some medium-volume mailing lists.
For the groups into which these mailing lists are split, I keep all old
articles, and I mark "read" articles as dormant.  This way, I can answer
(some large number) to the question of "How many articles from ..." when
entering the group, and I'll most likely see all messages in the threads of
the new messages.

Since the mail groups have > gnus-large-newsgroup messages, I'm *always*
prompted for the number of articles to retrieve.

So I made the following change to gnus-sum.el to support a default of 
[# unread + some constant] in answer to "How many articles from ..."

Would it be possible for someone with more elisp skill than myself to review
the following diff (made from gnus-5.8.2, I think) and add a better hook for
customisation at this point in the code?

Thanks

-Dave Liebreich