Feeding the trolls

[Richard Damon]

On 6/22/18 3:28 AM, Paul St George wrote:
> On 21/06/2018 10:05, Anssi Saari wrote:
>> D'Arcy Cain <darcy at VybeNetworks.com> writes:
>>
>>> One of these days I will have to figure out how to block replies to the
>>> trolls as well.
>>
>> Benefit of reading the mailing list via nntp (i.e. gmane): can easily
>> score down follow-ups to annoying people in addition to their
>> posts. Well, assuming a decent newsreader.
>>
>
> I have a decent newsreader (Thunderbird). How do I score down
> follow-ups to Bart and still see the respondents' other posts?

First, Thunderbird is really an email program that does Usenet, so
actually doesn't quite fall into that catagory, but it can do something
like that. Create a filter, the detect side of the filter would be from
is Bart, and the filter action would be ignore subthread (that will mark
as read any message from Bart and any message that is in reply to one of
his). This would actually work from the mailing list too.

Many more classically Usenet readers had a 'score' system where you
could include various attributes of the usenet message (similar to the
Thunderbird filter criteria) and give them a value, and if the filter
just used information in the 'overview' of the message (a subset of the
headers) and based on the value decide if it wants to download the message.

Because Email doesn't provide a similar overview function, email based
programs tend not to support this type of filter. It was important for
Usenet as it is (or at least was) a much higher volume of information
(and noise) system, so it was quite common to pull down only a subset of
a group.

-- 
Richard Damon