Killfile Overview

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. And some newsgroups get so many posts per day that your only hope of keeping up is to read only your favorite authors and nobody else. Therefore Pineapple News allows you to maintain a "killfile" of authors whose posts you'd rather not see.

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


Basics


Adding an author to the killfile

In the headers view, click on a message that was written by the author you'd rather not see anymore. Right-click to get the context menu. Select "Add to killfile." (Alternately you can select the Killfile option from the Message menu.) All messages written by that author will vanish from the 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 item to match a message unless the author and e-mail fields are completely 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.


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 change 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 on this help page.


When to apply the killfile

Normally Pineapple News applies killfile filtering as it is reading the messages in a folder. If any message read 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 posts 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. You do this by changing the ApplyToDownload setting in the program's initialization file, which is turned off by default. You can find out how to change it by reading the PineappleNews.ini Reference. This might make downloads faster for you since the program won't have to spend time downloading messages you don't want to read anyway, but in some instances it might actually increase your download time, because to make this work 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.


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. So to keep the killfile from growing too large I added a provision to make it "self-cleaning" so that older posters are automatically removed.

The amount of time a poster stays in the killfile before being automatically removed is determined by the RemoveTime setting in PineappleNews.ini. The default is 180 days, or about six months. You can set it to zero days to indicate that you don't want entries automatically removed.

This setting 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:

/boot/home/PineappleData/news/killfile.txt

This file will not exist until you have added at least one entry to the killfile. If all entries are automatically removed 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 the time that the poster will be automatically removed from the killfile. If this poster should never be removed the date/time will be specified as "None".

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


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