Usenet Explorer

First, I LOVE collections! So much nicer to see one entry instead of dozens/hundreds repeated over and over again.

But lately in the groups I visit, there are a lot of what UE would consider "misformed" headers. They're basically:

some-fix-text [x/y] filename

The x/y is the parts (xth part of y pieces). The problem is that UE seems to put several different filenames together, I assume because with the fixed text at the front, the x/y is the first difference, so it groups them all together (just a guess)

Is there some way for me to "teach" the collections to bump over this fixed text? Is this what the purple collection thing does? I just don't know how to make that happen. ...looked thru help, searched the forum here...

Any suggestions? THanks, Larry

You can either right-click on a particular header and select related articles or filter by whatever you need. Then you can rename and make your own custom collections. UE makes an educated guess as to which headers belong with each other. Unfortunately, people who continue to use shoddy posting software or don't configure their posts correctly will always infect newsgroups. In which case UE does what it can but the rest will have to be done manually.

Maybe I didn't understand...

If I select on of the troublesome headers, right click and pick "Select related headers", it still picks most of the troublesome headers.

I also tried right clicking on one of the troublesome headers then "Custom Collections", then "add to collection", but that only adds that one header.

The only thing that seemed to work is to apply a filter for the filename (the unique part of the subject line), select all of the headers and then make them a collection. It works, but it kind defeats the advantage as I could have just marked them for download.

Is there anything else? I guess what I'm looking for is a way to select a large bunch of headers, and then make a collection by saying "ignore the first X-characters of the subject line" or some thing to that effect.

thanks, Larry

The reason I said that you can either select related articles or filter is because that's the only way other than CTRL+clicking each individual header yourself manually. UE uses a best guess algorithm to create collections but due to people (idiots) posting with badly written/badly configured software despite many, many attempts to educate them otherwise, there will always be these problems that UE cannot work around automatically.

The solution you've found is to filter and then create custom collections. Once it's done - it's done and you can post in the relevant groups to complain to the posters about what they've done wrong but it'll be on deaf ears. Alex, I'm sure, will revisit issues like this in due course but larger features are being worked on currently. A possible way could be to ignore anything indicative of a segment number or file number, e.g '[1/2]', '[2/2]' and similar styles no matter where they lie within the subject line. Ignoring parentheses and numbers might or might not work in your favour depending on circumstances. It would be nice to have the option, though. Personally, I let out a sigh and get ready to hold down CTRL or type my filter before I get down to business.

Don't take this as my being dismissive of your questions. I'd really like to see UE handle these problematic posts automatically as well but the truth is it can't do everything all at once but maybe soon...

Josef,

Thanks I really do appreciate your info. It is frustrating because the offending poster is quite prolific... I'd filter out his post by his name, but he actually does post good things. He just makes it difficult to deal with.

Maybe the solution would be to look at the entire subject line disregarding the [x/y] part. Or be able to collect by looking at the subject line in reverse (then the filename would be first!).

Oh well... I thought maybe I was the dumb one, and didn't know how to handle it.

again, thanks for your info, Larry

There are a lot of cases when files with different names are posted into the same collection (with images it is very common, but not only images), just omitting the file number would make it worse since the total number is significant, if to take the total into account but to continue comparing further when the total is the same, we will get collections wrongly split into several collections or even completely broken into many separate files.

So with the mutually exclusive options the implementation of collections is just trying to cover most cases, you may try to ask the poster to use different subjects in his posts to make grouping the posts easier, it is also more logical, even alphabetical sort doesn't work well in such a case.

In the classical music group i saw someone posting like that, when total happens to be the same the different posts just alternate when sorted by subject or author.

I did say it might or might not work depending upon circumstance. I'm thinking along the lines of a checkbox in the filter bar to ignore numbers that can be switched on or off at will. Then the collections can reorder themselves and it may or may not work but, personally, I'd like to give it a go. Anything to speed up the process.

What do collections take into account? I'm assuming it's only subject line. Maybe it would be beneficial to compare subjects then author and/or date. Either way it's a tricky problem that most of us must muddle through one way or another. The only real solution I see is to threaten these posters with big sticks with nails in unless they post correctly.

P.S. Interesting to see you using sentence case in your posts now, Alex.