>For some of the newsgroups, and even listserves I follow -- I really want
>to read only about 10% or less of the posts. Why fill up my little PC
>disk (about 3 gigs) with all that text every few days, when I am just
>going to throw 90% of it away, either by automatic filtering or manual
>filtering of subject lines?
I read about 55-60 newsgroups, and my local Yarn newsbase is about 23MB
in size. Normally about half of that is empty slack space, since I do
regular housekeeping.
I do not fill up my disk with news. To do so would be senselessly
wasteful, IMhO.
>ISPs have a lot more disk space then we do. Does it not make sense to
>let them handle the mass storage, and let us actually download what we
>really intend to read?
I have 18GB of disk on this PC. I'll leave it as an exercise for the
reader as to whether or not I care about 23MB of disk space. :-)
>In this regard, I have it easy, since I have a shell account. I can use
>unix tools (e.g., procmail for mail and slrn or trn kill files for news
>) to do initial filtering on the server. I can quickly delete mail/news
>I dont want on line, and send to yarn, pretty much only what I want to
>read.
I tend to telnet into a shell account quite a bit and I remove spam and
other fluff I don't want to see if I'm in the mailreader (normally pine
under a unix flavor). But VSoup also lets me kill off large postings
quite easily (that's the only rule I enforce right now), and I killfile
off a few authors in Yarn by marking their postings as already read
(but they are still available for future reference).
>I tried maintaining a newsbase, with yarn duplicating all the unix stuff
> -- its own newsrc file, filters, etc. I found it faster and easier to
>do this stuff on the server. In most cases, it does not take that much
>time to do all my filtering and reading on the server side. I suppose
>anyone can do this, if desired, with free services like dejanews.
I use DejaNews all the time as a search tool. But it sucks (at least
in my opinion) as a daily newsreader.
>So why use yarn, or an offline anything to download huge amounts of news?
I have a relatively fast connection to the net now (670k/270k RADSL),
and yet I prefer to use my VSoup+Yarn method. It works, it gives me a
searchable local newsbase, and it's fast.
Even with a modem connection, my newsfeed was only 1-3MB a day. That
isn't all that much data.
--
-Rich Steiner >>>---> rsteiner@visi.com >>>---> Bloomington, MN
OS/2 + Linux (Slackware+RedHat+SuSE) + FreeBSD + Solaris +
WinNT4 + Win95 + PC/GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven!
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.