Re: How is Yarn Really used?
From: John Ross (vsy8kb@ibm.net)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 16:30:47 -0500
theo@ccnet3.ccnet.com wrote:
>I am quite curious about whether people really download a large volume
>of news onto their hard disk, regularly, use yarn to read it, and then
>delete the processed news.
>
>To me the salient issue is the Kbyte count: I could see downloading
>many articles regularly but not many Mbytes that must get deposited
>and than deleted from my PC. Further, there are few newsgroups I want
>to follow regularly, systematically - article by article. Mostly,
>I browse both newsgroups and articles within a particular newsgroup.
>It seems impractical to me to download huge amounts of data, just
>to select from them offline on a random basis.
>
>Therefore I am curious about other people's yarn use patterns.
>
I use yarn and download about 2meg a day spread out over several
runs. This is for about 5 newsgroups that have lots of posts but
small in length, (high traffic low volume?) These I follow article
by article. Then there are about 20 more newsgroups that I get,
these have far less volume, but I follow these closely too. There
are a few newsgroups maybe 5? that I get which have very little
traffic, and what traffic is there is often of no interest to me.
I also use free agent, and scan maybe 100 newsgroups for the article
headers, and maybe download the bodies of 1% of the posts.
I use yarn maybe 3-5 times a day and agent once every 1-4 days.
Although in the past I used extensive filtering in yarn (well vsoup
really) I don't do much filtering anymore. I skip any articles that
are longer than 500 lines, and I skip all messages in alt.anonymous
and alt.anonymous.messages except those that match a specific
pattern.