Xref: utzoo news.groups:15938 comp.misc:7811
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!emv
From: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Administrivia: comp.archives policy change
Message-ID: <EMV.89Dec27150440@urania.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 27 Dec 89 20:04:40 GMT
References: <1989Dec26.121345.1270@twwells.com>
Sender: news@math.lsa.umich.edu
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor MI.
Lines: 32
In-reply-to: comparc@twwells.com's message of 26 Dec 89 12:13:45 GMT

In article <1989Dec26.121345.1270@twwells.com> comparc@twwells.com (comp.archives) writes:

   (Hey Ed! Thanks! But how
   are you finding all this stuff?!?)

 It's not too hard, really.  Some of the newsgroups I just read
 normally as a matter of course & notice things that way.  Otherwise
 if there's a group with occasional interesting things but the vast
 majority of which I don't care about, a GNUS kill file works nicely.
 Here's an example (from comp.ai):

   (gnus-kill "" "FTP\\|^%A" "u")
   (gnus-kill "Subject" ".")
   (gnus-expunge "X")

loosely translated this looks for the strings 'ftp' and '%A'
in the entire text of unread messages, marks these as unread,
then marks everything else as read and hides them.  Et voila,
this captures many FTP site postings and also bibliographies
in refer format.  

Other groups get similar kill files, occasionally including
the name or site of a known good contributor to the group.

It took most of an evening to construct the kill files cause
I did it sort of brute force, but now things clip along nicely.

Though I haven't tried it, Brad's recently posted NewsClip(tm)
code looks like it would be amenable to the same task, though
I haven't bothered yet.

--Ed