There is no such thing as a stupid question here as long as it pertains to using NewsBin. Newbies feel free to get help getting started or asking questions that may be obvious. Regular users are asked to be gentle.
Hmm, no, there is not a group negation feature. You can load groups you want to search into a group folder then select that from the "Search in Group/Topic" dropdown. So it supports including a list of groups, not excluding. There is a limit to the number of groups you can include though, typically around 15 or so.
It'd be nice to have on a filter something like: Reject If -> Group Contains -> ... This would remove a lot of noise and inappropriate stuff from search results.
I'll consider it. Maybe a special expression in the search string? Would like to avoid any user interface changes in Newsbin.
for example -GROUP:alt.binaries.blah
Tricky part would be how to handle crossposts. If it is crossposted to a bunch of groups but one of the groups is negated in the search expression, should I suppress it?