The Killfile

USENET is a big wild woolly world. Everybody is pretty much free to do whatever they want. That freedom is part of its charm, but it also leads to abuse. Also, some newsgroups get so many posts per day that your best bet for keeping up is to read only your favorite authors. Therefore, Pineapple News allows you to maintain a “killfile” of authors whose posts you’d rather not see.

The killfile is an enhanced feature that you can only use if you have paid for your copy of Pineapple News.

Adding an author to the killfile

In the headers view, click on a message written by an author you’d rather not see anymore. Control-click or right-click to get the context menu. Select “Killfile Author.” (Alternately, you can select the “Killfile Author” option from the Message menu.) All messages written by that author will vanish from view.

Note that some authors tend to change their posting name or e-mail address slightly every now and then, specifically to evade killfiles. Pineapple News will not consider an existing killfile entry to match a message unless the author and e-mail fields are identical, down to the last byte. Unfortunately, you have no option but to killfile each and every variation of an annoying poster’s author and e-mail strings. I know that sounds less than ideal, but there are technical reasons for doing it this way. An exact-match killfile can be queried much faster than a fuzzy-match killfile.

Removing an author from the killfile

I really wanted to have a pretty window written that would allow you to list all authors in your killfile and edit them before I made the killfile public. Alas, it was not to be. To remove an author, read the Storage section below for instructions on editing the killfile text file directly. Note that you might not need to do this, as by default authors will automatically be removed from the killfile after six months. More details on how this works are revealed later in this help topic.

When to apply the killfile

Pineapple News applies killfile filtering as it is reading the messages in a folder. If a message is encountered that is authored by a killfiled poster, then it will not be added to the headers view. Note that the killfile is not applied when viewing messages in saved message folders, because that wouldn’t make any sense.

You can choose to also apply the killfile while downloading new messages from newsgroups. This might make downloads faster for you, since the program won’t have to spend time downloading messages you don’t want to read, but in some instances it might actually increase your download time, because the program has to retrieve overview data for each newsgroup before it starts to get new messages, which takes time. This feature won’t work if your news server doesn’t support the XOVER command. Note: This feature is not yet implemented. Sorry!

Changing how long an entry stays in the killfile

It’s my experience that you rarely need to keep an author in your killfile for more than a few months. In that amount of time, the offender will most likely have changed their posting name or moved on to greener pastures. To keep the killfile from growing too large, I added a provision to make it “self-cleaning” so that older entries are automatically removed.

The default killfiled time is 180 days, or about six months. You can set it to “Infinite” to indicate that newly-added entries should not be removed.

This only affects entries you add to the killfile after the setting has been changed. That’s because each entry in the killfile has its own auto-remove time, separate from all others, so previous entries will retain whatever auto-remove time they had before you made the change. Eventually, there will be a nice window which will allow you to change the auto-remove time for each entry in the killfile.

Storage

The killfile is stored in a plain text file which will have the following full pathname, assuming you haven’t changed the location of your PineappleData directory:

/Users/[yourname]/Library/PineappleData/News/Data/Killfile.txt

This file will not exist until you have added at least one entry to the killfile. If all entries are auto-expired, then the file will be erased.

Since the program both reads and writes this file, you should not try to modify it while Pineapple News is running. Changes you make won’t take effect until the program is stopped and restarted anyway.

Each line contains four items separated by tab characters. The first two are strings representing the author and e-mail address of the killfiled poster. Any non-ASCII characters should be in the UTF-8 character set.

The third and fourth items are date/time values. You can see the format by looking at the file. The first of these represents the date and time that this poster was added to the killfile. The second one represents how long this entry will stay in the killfile. If this poster should never be removed, the killfiled time will be specified as “Infinite”.

You can edit a killfile entry by typing in new values. To remove an entry, simply remove its line from the file altogether.

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