newsbin.com

The "new files" column is completely useless to me.

What I want to see up front is how many file headers I have actually physically downloaded in a given group. If I want to know how many are "new" then I can just use the age filters when I peruse that group.

As it stands now, I can download a hundred thousand headers in a group, but as soon as I look in that group, the "new files" counter goes to 0, and I'm stuck with a list of groups with zeros in the "new files" column which tells me absolutely NOTHING.

So is there any way I can get rid of the "new files" function and replace it with a total file count function?

What I want to see up front is how many file headers I have actually physically downloaded in a given group. If I want to know how many are "new" then I can just use the age filters when I peruse that group.

Newsbin doesn't actually keep track of "headers" or "posts" at that level. By the time there's something to display, all the posts have gotten combined together into files so, files are what's counted.

As it stands now, I can download a hundred thousand headers in a group, but as soon as I look in that group, the "new files" counter goes to 0, and I'm stuck with a list of groups with zeros in the "new files" column which tells me absolutely NOTHING.

It tells you you've already looked at the new files for this group. So, that's something.

You know the "new/old" state of the posts will tell you what you just downloaded too. You can set Newsbin to automatically "old" posts you've looked at so, when you look at the updated group, only the new files will be green.

If I understand what you're looking for, you're just looking at a "total files" in a group with no time factor at all, just totals?

Quade wrote:If I understand what you're looking for, you're just looking at a "total files" in a group with no time factor at all, just totals?

Yes, that's what I would prefer.

The face of usenet has changed drastically in the last decade or so.

At one time, a "huge" newsgroup would have 20-30 thousand headers in it, and a hundred or more would be added daily, even as headers were "rolling off the back end" after a couple of weeks or so. In those days, knowing how many new headers have arrived today or in the last couple of days was useful so that you could peruse them and take what you wanted before they disappeared a few days or weeks later.

But today you could split usenet into 2 types: The super groups and the archival groups.

The super groups are currently active, have millions of headers, and get hundreds or thousands of new headers daily.

The archival groups are those groups popular or extant in the past. These groups have tens or hundreds of thousands of headers collected over a range of 5 or 6 years but are no longer regularly updated. Since such groups might gain a couple hundred new headers, if any at all, over periods of months, then seeing how many "new files" there are is essentially useless since I'm mainly using these groups to search for ancient material that has been effectively "archived" by ever increasing retention times.

And this is why I want to see how many total headers are in a group right up front on the "groups" list.

I have 4 servers I use, and I download all headers for 3 of them (usenet-news doesn't compress headers for transmission), so the total headers in a given group are usually more than, say, supernews alone.

But it takes me a considerable amount of time to download these headers, and, whether justified or not, I just like seeing things like "887895" on a newsgroup. This is the number of files I expect to be available to me for searching, and to be quite honest, it irritates the hell out of me to find a specific header in a search, and when I go into that newsgroup to look at associated headers, the damned counter drops to 0.

IOW, I DON'T CARE how many "new" files there are, I use these groups for OLD files, and nothing else, and I don't like seeing a dozen "0 new files" in my face when all I want to know are how many total files there are in those groups.

As a possible alternative, is there a way of marking ALL files as "new" so that they show as such on the groups page? This would be similar to Agent newsreader's function where you could mark some or all headers in a group as read or unread.

The super groups are currently active, have millions of headers, and get hundreds or thousands of new headers daily.

Haha, You're way off. The largest groups have 4-6 billion posts and get a couple million new posts a day.

The archival groups are those groups popular or extant in the past. These groups have tens or hundreds of thousands of headers collected over a range of 5 or 6 years but are no longer regularly updated. Since such groups might gain a couple hundred new headers, if any at all, over periods of months, then seeing how many "new files" there are is essentially useless since I'm mainly using these groups to search for ancient material that has been effectively "archived" by ever increasing retention times

In my experience this "archive" lasts about 2000 days and then things start bit-rotting. Meaning downloads are problematic > 2000 day out.

Newsbin doesn't know how many headers are in a group. I could probably determine the number of files but, the groups in Newsbin are only granular down to files and in some cases sets of files. I could fake it by looking at the range.db3 but, it would just be an estimate then.

The whole point of the "new" column is to tell you how many files have showed up since the last time you looked. I'll download all the headers for all my groups at once then see which groups have new content. Having a total count tells me nothing. I know the groups contain something or else I'd have deleted them.

I understand what you're looking for. No promises but, I'll think about it.

Quade wrote:Haha, You're way off. The largest groups have 4-6 billion posts and get a couple million new posts a day.

I hear ya...

I understand what you're looking for. No promises but, I'll think about it.

Appreciated.

Thanks Quade!