Coming Attraction: "Kill Files" (Ignore and more)

[John Robinson]

Many familar with USENET News may have heard of the killfile, or of killfiling someone. A killfile is simply a list of names you wish to ignore. Any posts with a matching name in the killfile are discarded, unread.

The Focus software will have the ability to killfile posters, or in other words, the often requested "Ignore" feature.

However, Focus killfiles will be much more.

First, a little info about how the posting software works. When a post is made, a number of records are placed onto a list. This list is the source data for the Self-Search routine among other things. Each record is associated with a comment, but a comment can have any number of such records. The record associates a user with a comment, and also notes how the association is made. This association field is similar to what you might see in a mail program. There are 'From' and 'To' associations, as well as 'CC' and 'BCC' associations. Each mean something different, but all associate a user with a comment.

FROM - The user who posted the comment.

TO - A user mentioned in the "To:" field.

CC - This will be reserved for bumps. It's currently not used.

BCC - This will be used for concealed bumps. Have a long bump list? Use BCC and conserve screen real estate!

The Focus version of the killfile will operate on these associations. This is the "What". You will be able to ignore all bumps (CCs) 'in some particular context'.

The "Context" is the magic, it defines when you ignore "What".

Want to ignore bumps? "What" = "bumps", "Context" = "all".

Want to ignore all posts involving you on a particular thread? "What" = anything, "Context" = some thread.

Want to ignore all posts from some user? "What" = anything, "Context" = some user

Or just their bumps? "What" = "bumps", "Context" = some user.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE ...

Not only will you be able to describe what you want to ignore, you will also be able to describe other actions as well. An "Action" is one of: Ignore, Deny, Allow, or Promote.

IGNORE -- silently discard the comment from your self-search

DENY -- informs the user that you do not wish to receive such-and-such.

ALLOW -- accepts the comment into your self-search.

PROMOTE -- accepts and flags the comment. Want special notice of anything JohnRob bumps to you? "What" = "Bump"; "Context" = "user John Robinson"; "Action" = "Promote"

You can specifically "ALLOW" comments because you can set defaults. You can setup your defaults to never allow bumps from anyone. And then further instruct the software to allow bumps from JohnRob. The more specific defined rule wins.

Now, I should note that IGNORED or DENIED comments are still accessible. It will take an extra click to get to these, but that will not be a problem because you didn't want to see them in the first place.

Additionally, you will be able to delete individual comments from your Self-Search, or even wipe the slate completely.

These features are not yet ready, I have some footwork to do before I go there, but this is what is in store for you.

Of related interest, we will have the ability to WATCH various things. A separate list will allow us to know, via automatic BCC bump, any new thread posted to your favorite forum. The watch list is further out yet, but will be a reality as time permits.

[John Robinson]

Yes. Regardless of how that function is actually implemented, it will end up also being in a User Preference setting (for those unwilling to brave a custom killfile.)

I'm going to try to give a very simple interface to the killfile on threads and such, and an advanced interface a click or two away for the power users.

[gitmo]

Excellent. What's your ETA?

[John Robinson]

I have a physical notepad for all my major projects. I make paper notes mostly, I like to doodle. When I come close to finalizing my idea, I translate the paper notes onto the computer and start writing code (or psuedocode.) Then sometimes I write small test apps or more often just hack the whole thing into my project. Once I have a mass of code fleshed out, I tinker with it until kingdom come.

[smith288]

I should really do it that way... I find myself fighting myself out of the box i built myself into...

You ever look into PHP? I hear that is fast as heck.

[John Robinson]

I hate setting dates. They always slip behind. Let's say sometime in the not so near future, but not so far ahead to label it the distant future.

Though I have to be frank. I was given a lifetime achievement award by the FR Network, and the vote for that was I think cast just before I made the big format change. I bet those people would have voted differently if I had started a week earlier on the new format. :-D So I'd like to win back the hearts and minds of the Freepers (without having to go back to the old format. :-D) If there is sufficient interest in this project, I will push it forward and have it done well-before the FRiva event (where I will actually be presented with the award.)

[John Robinson]

I like Perl. I've studied PHP, and to be honest, it's not obfuscated nearly as well as Perl. I'm so used to coding in Perl, my home keys are @#$% and ;{}\

That's just about everything you need to type to produce well-writen self-documenting code, in Perlese.

[smith288]

why so many different symbols? All i use primarily is <% %> everything else is vbscript tightly wound into the OS. (good or bad, I love how powerful it is for what I want).

[altair]

Scared ya, didn't I?

No. You write clean looking code.

[altair]

Excellent. Thanks for all the fine work you've done. Does ignoring a poster include entire threads? As in, will we be able to eliminate all articles posted by certain people? Also, will you include a way to put all articles posted by certain people to the top?

FYI, have you ever heard of the Emacs-based mail and newsreader called Gnus? It doesn't use killfiles, instead, it uses score files. Scores are numeric and can be based on context (matching subject text, etc.), author. While reading, you are also allowed to manually score up or down. The manual is here if you want to cherry pick ideas.

[John Robinson]

Well, ya gotta have the sigils ($, @, %, *) to know what kinda data you're working with (scalars, arrays, hashes, or typeglobs.) You need a liberal dose of curly braces to designate blocks of code, hash lookups, 'type coercion'(because the built-ins are broken, IMHO, they should accept references), or to disambiguate expressions--particular those resolving to references to data. You need -> to dereference said data. You can't have regular expressions without !~ and the equally agreeable =~ or slashes. And with regular expressions you need lots of slashses, forward slashes, backward slashes, I'm sure Larry would work in sideways slashes if there were such a beast. Regular expressions rock! A whole microlanguage for the budding symbologist. You need + and * to greedily select atoms, or +? and *? if you're feeling stingy. Parens, lots of parens to group atoms, and you often want non-capturing parens (speed optimization) so be sure to use (?:) non-capturing parens. Often times we'll want to match wildcards, so use either the backslash letter character classes (ie: \w alphanumerics and underscores) or user-defined char classes (square brackets, characters, often using dashes to represent ranges, ie, hex: [0-9a-fA-F]), or dots for the ultimate wildcard (that unfortunately doesn't match newlines, so use .|\n, the pipe being an alternative--this or that. It's a C-like language, and thus requires all statements to end with semi-colons. Single and double quotes to represent strings (non-interpolating and interpolating) double-colons to reference other packages ($Focus::r -- a previous allocated reference to a request in the Focus package) uh... and being Perl, all special variables are sigil-symbol. $_ is the scalar representing the default "whatever" (The diamond operator by default assigns output to $_, foreach and map assign to $_, split reads $_ and splits into @_ by default, etc... etc...) There are probably just as many sigil-symbols as there are symbols. Nah, we can always find a spare sigil-symbol to store the odd tidbit. And of course, who couldn't love a language that uses a spaceship operator? <=> a strcmp for numbers, great for a sort. (strcmp for strings is the cmp operator, there are also gt, lt, ge, le, eq, and ne string operators.) String concatenation is the dot.

Comments start with a hash. And of course all Perl code written for Unix machines begins with the shebang (#!) which is actually a Unix kernel constuct to declare a script interpreter. IE: #!/usr/bin/perl -wT

Larry Wall either designed Perl as a joke or he's a crack addict. Or a very funny crack addict. But I love Perl.

[John Robinson]

Ohhh score files! I like. But I don't know if we'll have the processing power to do that justice.

[John Robinson]

And thanks.

And, ignoring a poster should ignore the thread header, but not any bumps and stuff to you within the thread. I don't think at least. I'll have to think about that one some more, but it's probably not feasible. Always gotta keep a conscious eye on how long it takes to complete a request, gotta get them out the door ASAP to handle the next. Can't let this stuff pile up in the webserver--logjam.

[farmfriend]

Does this mean that I will be able to ignore my own posts in my self-search list, so that I see only the responses, and not my own posts?

Now that's an idea. I already know what I said.

[farmfriend]

If I could ask for the impossible, I would like to see posts that accuse you of things that are not true automaticly deleted. That way I wouldn't have to read how I am a Bush basher if I disagree with that one policy etc.

You know, if that is not too much to ask. : )

[Grampa Dave]

Great, there are two forum sites that I use besides Free Republic. They both offer the kill option. Want to ignore all posts from some user? "What" = anything, "Context" = some user

This is the greatest invention/programing asset on these sites. One is a supposedly Conservative Political site often overrun by liberals and those claiming to be conservatives. One is a fly fishing site. The ability to block out clymers is wonderful.

This will be a massive improvement with your great site.

Congratulations on two nice events this week for you and your dad , the judgement, and the successful Freepathon for this summer!

Thanks for all that you do for this site and for us!

[John Robinson]

We'll have to wait and see where this technology takes us first!

[altair]

Another feature of Gnus that you might want to pick up (for the autoconversion to HTML), is its textual emphasis notation. It's easier to explain by example. _word_ would become <U>word</U> in your output, *word* would become <B>word</B> and /two words/ would become <I>two words</I>. I don't know how hard that would be to implement with your parser, but it is an incredibly handy feature to have with straight textual mail and news. I like adding emphasis occasionally.

[John Robinson]

OMG! I was thinking about implementing *exactly* that earlier today, with the exception that I will not eat the characters that cause the formatting change--I thought it might cause problems. It should be very easy to do.

[PhiKapMom]

This is a great idea! Thanks for the ping!