newsbin.com

As part of my tests of NB6, i have downloaded headers from a certain group and even though i expected some of them to be grouped, it seems they are not.

What is the logic in grouping headers? I mean, NB seems to distinguish the filename when "show filenames" is checked, doesn't it group headers based on that filename and the similarity in the beginning of the header title? Does it need the whole title to be the same and only the final part (containing the filename and path numbers) to differ?

It's better to compact too little than too much. Too much and you potentially hide files that really shouldn't be grouped together. Newsbin looks at the subject, tries to extract the filename and tries to match it. If the filename's unquoted, like the yEnc spec requires, it doesn't try very hard.

Some formatting is too weird to combine. Or if I combine it, it'll combine things in other groups that don't follow the same format and shouldn't be combined.

Quade wrote:Some formatting is too weird to combine. Or if I combine it, it'll combine things in other groups that don't follow the same format and shouldn't be combined.

Yes, i can understand what you mean. Having more than 6000 headers in a single group which could be combined in about 100 header groups (and now they aren't) is a little frustrating though. Perhaps you could give the user the ability to manually select headers and "force" their grouping by a context menu entry. Of course the grouping algorithm should be either more advanced than what exists now or perhaps the user could somehow define a grouping pattern himself. What do you think?

There has been some discussion about whether there should be a facility for the user to select a number of entries and be able to define them as a new group. However this has lots of ramifications so if it ever appears I expect it would be a 6.1 or later feature.

Yeah, it's on my todo list. It might make 6. Newsbin's designed to work whether they're grouped or not though.

Quade wrote:Yeah, it's on my todo list. It might make 6.

Great to hear. Let's hope it will make it, if not 6 then perhaps 6.1. It would be a nice addition.