newsbin.com

6.40b4.1948 - spurious red warnings for non binaries

VERY MINOR issue follows, it is more of a remark than anything else, for "wish list" level of your TODO list.

If a large group of files is selected to download and small m3u and sfv files of over 1.0 kilobyte are DESIRED for backend custom validation, some trivial text only posts get erroneously interpreted via my user actions (possibly i need to learn about a hidden feature), as BINARY files even though they have no attachments, merely because I send them to downloads file list. Happily the empty payloads are not saved to disc, in my tests of non empty nonbinaries, but worse, these totally empty messages evoke and erroneous red warning on giganews of :

[15:57:14] ERROR Download Engine Giganews_Main - NNTPServer: Post has an empty body. This might mean it's been removed due to DMCA action :REQ: Orianthi "Believe"

The entire empty post is of course a request with subject line of "REQ: Orianthi "Believe" found in a 3 year old post in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd on giganews.

astraweb fill server also evokes the same spurious red warning as above

BUG EFFECT : NEGLIGIBLE but confusing

Many other newsgroup readers let you hide all posts lacking attachments in the main select lists, typically via a toggle button on the screen.

Since astraweb and giganews probably do not react to DMCA requests this way (YET), but conceivably would if the DMCA asset was indeed a lone solitary post with perhaps a PS3 private crypto key in text comment, maybe treat these two companies specially, AND REWORD THE MESSAGE TO BE LESS ALARMING?

I did not look at the headers of this post to see if that specific accidentally selected post is peculiar or not.

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USING THE POST SIZE AS A LIST FILTER IS INSUFFICIENT : I tried typing 1.2 kilobyte and it got converted to 12 kilobyte
I need 1.7 kilobyte for some sfv and m3u files to be saved to disc, I use custom tools to reverse match and correlate all nzb, par2, sfv, files back to originating file groups (using CRC32 for sfv, MD516k and full MD5 for par2 first wave pass, for nzb i use of course message subjects), and then perform par2 and rar using my own tools.

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How the nonbinary message selections happen in the first place :

On mac the pagedown key scrolls the screen somewhat mimicking a mouse click in the scrollbar region, enabling faster list selections in a long list, in this product and under Windows 7 no combination of modifier allows pagedown to move the scroll view, as far as I have found. I have to position and move the mouse to retain prior sets of discontiguous lsit selections. That is one way I accidentally selected message REQ: Orianthi "Believe"

On Mac and Windows SHIFT held will continue a CONTIGUOUS range, but DISCONTIGUOUS selection on mac and windows is allowed (CMD key on mac, CNTRL on windows) and is supported in this product PARTIALLY. Thee part that fails is I cannot DRAG HIGHLIGHT a range of files to add to hundreds of DISCONTIGUOUS selections in a mp3 window list, because drag highlighting while depressing control keys does NOT ADD FILES TO THE SELECTION!!! That can be fixed programatically. As it is now it takes 8 times longer to select 20,000 files to download that I want from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd without accidentally getting sloppy and selecting text-only non-binaries such as message REQ: Orianthi "Believe"

It would be less an issue if the text messages evoked no dire red warnings, or were possible to eliminate entirely from display prior to file selections.

There are many other bug-oriented reasons the program drove me to accidentally select that message causing the red dire error message, but the effect of a huge red warning and claiming DMCA is triple annoying because it reminds me of the awkward way to select files that no mac product has. I refer to mac in this post, only because I am aware that noncontinuous selection using CONTROL KEY +MOUSE PRESS DRAG fails in most microsoft products, and is done right in MOST mac and apple products since ancient times.

It would be better to be able to turn of these warning and have the items disappear either before download or before list selection if user toggles to see only BINARIES, not comments

Maybe I overlooked a feature to aid me in this issue. It is my first couple days ever running it in my life, but have used usenet since 1992. 20 years! eeeks.

CONGRATS FOR CRAFTING SUCH A SPECTACULAR PRODUCT!

1 - You can generate a filter profile for the files you want.

[.]ext
[.]m3u
....

1 per extension in the "subject accept" filter. Then assign the filter to the group (right click properties on the group or topic). With the filters active, only the matching items will be shown. You can switch filters on the fly to see everything or just see matching items. The filter enable button is the power looking button in the middle of the post list display. You don't have to assign it to the group, you can simply select it from the filter profile dropdown. You can have multiple filter sets to customize how you view the posts.

2 - In the options, you can check "Show PAR/NFO" and it'll let small text files bypass the size filters. In that way you can set a 1 meg min size filter and still see these little junk files. I added "m3u" to the small file size filter bypass. It'll be in the next beta. M3U's not in B4.


It's a balancing act between giving up too soon and keeping the download list clean. It's biased toward leaving things in the download list in hopes that things get better. The DMCA message is pretty accurate. Astraweb returns empty posts when they DMCA files. Giganews on the other hand returns 430 errors. If you have multiple servers, you don't want Newsbin to drop things out of the download list too soon.

You do know you can add related groups to a topic and load them all up into the list at once? Then you don't have to bother with loading one group at a time.

Wow THANKS!

I appreciate you adding m3u to ''Show PAR/NFO'' to upcoming release candidates !

I had added ".par2" manually in a list just in case par was literal, and did not take time to test if needed whitelisting, but I assume it also keeps those via ''Show PAR/NFO''.

Sometimes sfv is pretty small too. And some people LOVE sfv files, I myself rely on them them for the many people that use them but do not upload par nor par2 , but only upload m3u and sfv in many music groups.

If you have all the headers you can usually tell if there are any common attachments, so a future wish list item would be to copy feature others have of hiding nonbinary posts, despite a couple scenarios with tradeoffs.

You guys work FAST! Amazing!

THANK YOU