Re: Feature idea: gnus-summary-novice-warn-if-repying-to-nntp-group

[Benjamin Rutt <rutt+news@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

Niels Langager Ellegaard <gnalle@ruc.dk> writes:

> When replying to usenet articles I sometimes (by mistake) press "r"
> instead of "f". So I write an e-mail instead of a followup. I am going
> to rebing the r button so that it gives me a warning if I reply to the
> author in an nntp group. However I would like to propose that Lars (or
> some similar guru) includes the following variable in gnus.
>   
> gnus-summary-novice-warn-if-repying-to-nntp-group-p
>
> The idea is that whenever this variable was set to non-nil the program
> should warn the user, if the user tries to reply to the author of an
> article in an nntp group.

Good idea.  I agree, there should be a user variable you could enable
to warn you on such occasions.  Until that happens, you can use the
following advice in your ~/.gnus:

(defadvice gnus-summary-reply (around reply-in-news activate)
  "Prompts before allowing a reply to a Usenet article."
  (interactive)
  (if (or (not (gnus-news-group-p gnus-newsgroup-name))	; short-circuit
          (y-or-n-p "Really reply by mail to article author? "))
      ad-do-it
    (message "Reply aborted.")))

BTW, I'd recommend always using 'F' or 'f' for responding to any
article, whether it's mail or news.  That approach works great for me.
When you really want to use 'R', you can use it for replying by mail
to a usenet article (I rarely need to do so).
-- 
Benjamin