| Finding what you want |
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NewsBin 4.0 has very extensive filtering capabilities to match user defined expressions in subjects or filenames, as well as to set file size ranges and cross post thresholds. |
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| Finding what you want > Lockout Poster |
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If you are seeing many unwanted posts which are posted by the same person, you can use the Lockout Poster command to filter out any posts made by that person. To do this, right click on one of the posts and select Poster Lockout, or hit Ctrl-P. This command will take the posters' email address from the post or posts highlighted and add them to the list of locked out posters. This means that any post that was posted from the locked out email address will be automatically filtered from the post list. If you want to filter out posters matching a more general string, then you can use the Lockout Poster Keyword command, either by right clicking on the posts and selecting Lockout Poster Keyword, or by hitting Ctrl-W. This command will take any portion of the poster's email address and add them to the list of locked out posters. This means that any post that was posted with an email address that matches the specified text will be filtered from the post list. If you decide you no longer wish to filter out a specific poster, you may use the Unlock Poster command, (again either by right clicking on the posts and selecting Unlock Poster, or by hitting Ctrl-U). This command will remove the poster's email address from the list of locked out posters. |
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| Finding what you want > Mark as Downloaded |
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If there is a post you no longer wish to be displayed, you may add it to the PostID Cache by right clicking con it, and selecting Mark as Downloaded, or hitting the Delete Key. This will prevent NewsBin from displaying the post again unless Ignore Filters is selected on the Filter Bar or the PostID Cache is disabled. |
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| Finding what you want > Filter Profiles |
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In order to help deal with the immense number of headers you may have to deal with, NewsBin has the ability to create Filter Profiles, which can be applied either manually at any time, or automatically whenever a specific group is viewed. The screen to design and alter these filters can be brought up by either
using the NewsBin comes with a single Filter Profile named default which is applied to every group unless it is manually changed. This default filter is designed to both filter out posts without files in them, as well as protect from virii. As such, it filters out all *.bat, *.com, *.exe, *.htm, *.html, and *.pif files, as well as posts under 20000 bytes. If you want to change a filter set (including the default one), select the filter set you want to modify from the list on the left side of the window. The filter can then be viewed and edited using the tabs on the right side of the screen. These tabs are explained in detail below. To create a new Filter Profile, click the New Profile button and specify a name for your new filter set. If you have a previous filter set defined that is close to what you want the new filter set to be, you can specify the other filter set as a "Template" and that will be used as a starting point for your new filter set. Once you have named your filter set, and template, if desired, hit OK and the template will appear in the list on the left side of the screen, ready to edit. To apply a Filter Profile to the Post List, use the Apply Filter Profile dropdown on the Filter Bar. Only the posts which match the Filter Profile's criteria will be displayed in the Post List. Since you may want to use different filters on different newsgroups, you can configure a group to always use a specific Filter Profile by right clicking on the group you are interested in and selecting Filter Profile. The list of Filter Profiles will be displayed and you can choose one. In the future, each time you view that newsgroup, that Filter Profile will be applied. |
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| Finding what you want > Filter Profiles > Subject Filters Tab |
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For both subject and filename filters, NewsBin provides both an Accept list and a Reject list. You can specify any combination of these you wish. If both filter types are selected, the list of Accept filters is checked first, and anything passing the Accept filters is compared to the Reject filters. Anything found matching a Reject filter will be filtered out. The filters themselves use Perl-like regular expression parsing syntax. This is not the same as the DOS style wildcards. For example the DOS style *.jpg would be written as .*\.jpg in RegEx. The "." means "match any single character" and the "\" is an escape character so the second dot is taken literally instead of a command in the expression. You can read more about common RegEx expressions and how to build basic expressions on our website, and in our forums. Any expression entered here is applied to the subject portion of a post. Headers are filtered and hidden from the Post List if a post's subject does not meet the criteria entered here. Many posters include the filename of the attached file in the subject. Selecting a filename type filter in the Subject Filters is more efficient then using the File Filters but the filtering may not be 100% correct since the filename in the subject may not be the same as the actual filename. |
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| Finding what you want > Filter Profiles > File Filters Tab |
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File Filters use an accept and reject structure identical to those in the Subject Filters. Any expression entered here is applied to the actual filename of the attached file. It does not care about the filename given in the subject header as those are sometimes different, especially when it comes to spam or viruses. Because NewsBin does not know the actual filename until the binary portion of the post is being downloaded, these posts will be seen in the Post List unless they are filtered by a subject filter. When a filter hit is made on a filename, NewsBin will drop the connection to terminate the download and then re-connect to continue downloading other queued posts. Some news server don’t behave well to dropped connections, especially if you hit a long run of filenames that hit your filter, so subject Filters should always be used before Filename Filters. For performance reasons but it is prudent to use Filename Filters simply as a backup to catch unwanted .exe, .scr, .pif, .vbs, or other suspicious or unwanted filenames. |
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| Finding what you want > Filter Profiles > Settings Tab |
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Here you can set a Minimum File Size, Maximum File Size, or both for limiting the size of files that NewsBin will download. The file size filter is based on the file size reported in the header data and may not reflect the actual file size in the case of spam or virus postings. The Max Crosspost filter tells NewsBin to filter out any post that was posted to more than X different newsgroups. X being the number specified in the text box next to the Max Crosspost checkbox. |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar |
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The Filters Bar allows you to filter the posts displayed in the Post List by a number of factors. Each of these are discussed below. The filters available here are stackable, so posts will have to match all of the applied filters to be displayed. The only exception to this is Show Filtered Posts, which will override the Apply Filter Profile setting. |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Find |
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The Find Box allows you to place search criteria on the subjects of the posts. It makes use of regular expression parsing (also discussed in the forums) which is, in itself, an advanced topic. For most uses, you can simply type a word or a portion of a word into this field, hit the Find Button, or Enter, and NewsBin will filter out any posts not containing the word in their subject. Selecting the Drop Down Tab to the right of the Find Box shows a history of all search text that has been applied in the past. If you wish to clear that history, use the Utilities > Clear Filter History command. |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Show Filenames ONLY |
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Show Filenames ONLY is not exactly a filter. When it is selected, NewsBin does the best it can to determine what the filename is, if it's listed in the subject, and display that instead of the subject. Any text after the filename is also displayed. If the poster did not list something that looks like a filename in the subject, then the entire subject is displayed. This is very helpful for finding groups of files without them being separated by their different subjects, such as repost notes. One drawback is that column sorting when the Show Filenames option is selected will be noticeably slower because NewsBin is doing extra work to both sort all the items in the list and to figure out filenames. Please note that the filenames listed in the subject are not always the actual filename of the attachment because spammers frequently spoof the filename. Also posts containing multiple files will not have the correct filename displayed. But this does work correctly 99% of the time. |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Show Incomplete Posts |
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Show Incomplete Posts tells NewsBin to display
all Multi-Part Posts, even if all
the parts have not been found yet. An incomplete multi-part post will
be displayed with an |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Show Only New Posts |
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Show Only New Posts tells NewsBin to only display posts that are new since the last time you downloaded headers from that newsgroup. (Those with a green background.) |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Apply Filter Profile |
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The Apply Filter Profile drop down allows you to select a Filter Profile to be immediately applied to the post list. |
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| Finding what you want > Filters Bar > Ignore Filters |
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Checking the Show Filtered Posts checkbox will allow filtered posts to be seen in the Post List. This includes posts filtered by the PostID Cache (and as such, those you've already downloaded, as well as those marked as downloaded), as well as those filtered out by the current Filter Profile. |
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| Finding what you want > Searching spool files |
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Using the |
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| Copyright 2003 DJI Interprises |
to the left of the subject until all 