Finding new newsgroups

[PhiloVance]

When I DL the list of my server's newsgroups, is there a way that UE can tell me the newsgroups that have been added since the last time I did that? I'm looking for a way of finding out the names of any recently added new groups.

Also, is there a way to know which groups have been most active during this same time. Sometimes a few posters will "hijack" an existing but unused group and begin posting there, effectively creating a new group without creating a new name. Such groups are often quite busy, at least for a while, and would show up relatively high on a descending sort of recent posting activity. Again, this would be relative to the last time I DL'd the group list. If done frequently, than once past the old favorites like a.b.m.e and his brothers, any new faces will be apparent.

If there are no ways to do these things in UE, may I suggest them as features for a future release?

And thanks Alex, as always, for providing, developing and maintaining the best Newsreader on the planet.

Philo

[alex]

To monitor new groups in the newsgroup view you can invoke ctrl+a then invoke mark->read from the context menu.

Newly incoming newsgroups will be automatically marked new, you can check "New" on the quick filter (view menu).

You can also use read/flagged status if you like, as to read new entries will be "unread" and "unflagged".

You can sort by article number to see the number of articles, but there is no detailed estimation, also if a group suddenly grows like 30K-100K headers it may well mean it was flooded with spam.

[PhiloVance]

OK, how about if I mark all groups as "flagged." Then the next time I get the group list, any new groups will be "unflagged" which I can see by using ^flag on the quick filter. After I look at them, I then mark those new groups as "flagged" too, so that I can do the same process next time. Does that sound correct or have I misunderstood?

I prefer using "flagged" rather than "read" because "read" implies too many other things to me.

[alex]

yes it is all the same.

if "new" has different color (edit menu->font&colors) you can also use "mark old"

for newsgroup list the setting in properties->general->mark headers old on open view is not applied (since those are newsgroup names and not headers the option is not relevant), so new newsgroups remain new until marked old manually (or when marked read they also marked old).

with delta column maybe it would make sense, but also i'm not sure how exact the numbers are, then UE would need to keep the last article number and delta, still it would be too primitive, what would be really needed a statistical tool to analyze newsgroup traffic, with curve for each group like share price chart, in principle search service could do that, it has all the data.

[PhiloVance]

Yes, "Mark Old" sounds perfect since that really describes what we're talking about here. I do use different colors for new and old, so I'll do that.

It occurred to me that the Search Service must have all the necessary info to identify groups with the most activity as well as those that have suddenly become active, but I was reluctant to suggest it because it seems like it would not be a small job to implement such a thing. If you ever add a "Newsgroup Radar" like that to UE, it would be exactly what I'm looking for.

Thanks for your help.

[alex]

I add newsgroups monthly and there only few new groups maybe something around 20 a month.

My impression is what we would see traffic shifting to few groups with the rest keeping steady or declining.