# The Advanced &knode; Features

## Defining and Using Filters

You already read about using Filters in the chapter explaining the configuration of &knode;. We were talking about the built-in filters provided by &knode; there. You can configure the built-in filters like all the others. The screenshot shows the Dialog Box for configuring the Filters.

While filters and scoring are very powerful and have many uses, one of the most common requirements is simply to add all posts written by someone you don't wish to read to a killfile. At the end of this section is a quick guide to using filters and scores to create such a killfile.

The dialog New Filter The dialog New Filter

The dialog New Filter

First we will create a new filter. There will be the case, that you want to find your own articles among all the others. Or you do not want to see the articles of a particular person at all. Both cases can be solved by a simple filter on the Sender. Here are some examples:

## Do Not Show The Articles by a Particular Person

1. Settings Configure KNode...Reading News Filters

2. Select New...

3. Insert `Do not show idiot` in the Text Box Name

4. For making the filter appear in the menu, check show in menu.

5. Go to the area From.

6. Choose does NOT contain from the Drop Down Box.

7. Insert the name of the moron you want to ignore in the now active Text Box for example `Idiot`.

8. Confirm the filter settings with OK.

The filter now shows all articles, except the ones containing Idiot in the From: line.

You can combine the settings of the tab for Subject + From line with the settings on the other tabs. For example:

## Show only discussion with unread follow-ups on own articles.

1. Settings Configure KNode...Reading News Filters

2. Select the predefined filter threads with own articles

3. Select Copy

4. Insert `My threads with unread` in the Name field.

5. Select the tab Status

6. Select has new followups

7. Select true in the Drop Down Box next to it.

8. Confirm the filter settings with OK

   This filter shows all threads your are participating in, which have unread messages. Also, you saw the possibility, to use already existing filters as a base for new ones. This makes life easier for complex filters.

## Show all articles, no older than 3 days, containing KNode in the subject.

1. Settings Configure KNode...Reading News Filters

2. Select Add

3. Insert `Latest KNode threads` in the Name field.

4. For making the filter appear in the menu, check show in menu.

5. In the Drop Down Box apply on select single articles

6. Go to the area Subject and select does contain in the Drop Down Box.

7. Insert `knode` in the Text Box.

8. Change to Tab Additional

9. Select the Check Box Age

10. Place the following settings 0 < days <= 3

11. Confirm the filter settings with OK

    This filter, now, shows all articles, no older than 3 days, containing knode in the subject.

### Creating a Killfile

&knode; offers viewing filters (all, unread only, my posts, &etc;) and scoring filters (threads and articles start with a score of zero and can be adjusted according to author, thread, &etc;).

Using viewing filters you could hide articles according to poster, but this is not really suitable when you want to kill several posters universally.

Using the scoring gives lots of control but appears to filter only at the thread level: you can set watch and ignore (threads). Not good because you lose otherwise useful threads just because of one poster.

Solution is to use these in combination.

### Creating a Killfile

1. Go to Settings Configure KNode Reading News Filters.

2. Create a new filter below unread, called `killfile on`. Be sure that Apply to single articles is set and then click on the Additional tab. Set score equal to or less than zero (<=); then click the OK until you have exited the dialog.

3. Open an article whose author should be killed and just type &Ctrl;L(or select from Scoring menu Lower Score for Author). This opens the Rule Editor (a part of scoring). You can optionally give the rule a name that matches your author (`Kook`, for example.) and then if this is to be permanent, uncheck the expire automatically box. You'll see that this rule will change the author's score to minus ten (or as you wish). Save.

4. Go to the menu item View Filter killfile on.

This will cause any articles with scores less than zero will disappear. To kill additional authors you only need repeat the &Ctrl;L part of these instructions.

## The Composer

The &knode; composer provides many features, especially for posting and replying to articles.

### Publish Articles in Multiple Newsgroups

By selecting the Button Browse you can choose additional newsgroups, you want to publish your article in.

It is generally undesirable to post articles in multiple newsgroups. Please think about it twice. If you are not sure, where to post your article, ask in one of the possible groups. Somebody will tell you were to post.

### Redirect Followups

The main use of this feature is the case, when a thread has gone off topic for the newsgroup it is posted in. For example a thread in a &kde; newsgroup about how to redirect a followup in &knode; which leads to a dicussion about graphical and text based newsreaders.

Sometimes it happens that usenet users post an article into the wrong newsgroup. Very often those articles are just ignored. If it looks like the author did this unintentionally, you might like to tell it politely and make the followup articles go into the right group.

Another reason for using Followup-To: is a possible crossposting in multiple newsgroups. You should take care that the replies will be posted in one single newsgroup.

You can activate this by filling the text box Followups - To:. Here you can enter the suitable group. If there are multiple newsgroups in the Groups: field, they are shown in the drop down list.

When you enter `poster` here, instead of a newsgroup, the replies go directly to the author, not to the newsgroup.

Some people put an email address here, but this is not a valid entry. Use `poster` and correctly set your Reply-To address in the normal &knode; settings.

### Working With an External Editor

Using Tools Start External Editor you can start an editor of your choice, for editing the reply. So you can use your preferred Editor for writing articles and e-mails.

### Spelling

By selecting Tools Spelling, you can check the article in the composer on spelling errors.

### Sending Attachments

By selecting Attach Attach File you open the File Selection Dialog Box. Here you can choose the file you want to attach.

Most of the time, &knode; determines the correct MIME type for the attachment. If &knode; errs, you can correct the MIME type manually.

This screenshot shows the Composer with 2 attachments. A text file and a PNG picture.

Sending Attachments Sending Attachments

Sending Attachments

Only do this, if you know, what you're doing! An incorrect MIME type could cause a wrong sending of the attachment or that the attachment couldn't be rebuild after sending.

The English word attachment is used all over the world, you can use it in your language, too.

In most newsgroups, attachments are prohibited. Do not send unsolicited attachments. If you are asked to send them, look who is asking for. Mostly, this person wants you to send them by email.

The news server will probably reject article with attachments for most groups anyway, and those that do accept attachments will normally have the word binaries in their name. Some news servers even stop carrying non-binaries news groups that continuous receive attachments.

## Searching for Articles

Sooner or later, you will start searching for one specific article. The &knode; search feature is an easy way to do so.

You can reach the search function by selecting Edit Search Articles... or the F4 key. The screenshot below shows the Search Dialog Box.

The Search Dialog Box The Search Dialog Box

The Search Dialog Box

The Search Dialog Box has four tabs, which allow several search criteria. The first tab contains the settings for the criterion Subject and From. The second tab contains the settings for the message-IDs of an article and its references. The third tab contains the settings for the Status of an article. Additional contains the criteria, which do not belong to the first or second tab.

You probably already noticed the similarities between the Filter Dialog Box and the Search Dialog Box. The usage is the same and should not be too complicated, if you already defined your own filters.

&knode; always searches in the currently active newsgroup. A search in all newsgroups is not possible at the moment. After the Search finished, the articles found appear in the article view. When you close the Search Dialog Box, When you close the Search Dialog Box with Closethe search results are deleted, and the old view of the newsgroup appears again.

### Start Search

With this button you start the Search with the search criteria you defined. All articles in the selected newsgroup, fulfiling this criterias, appear in the article view.

### New Search

This button resets all search criteria.

## Supersede and Cancel Articles

This chapter deals with superseding and canceling articles. You will not use this two features very often, but they belong to the comfort features of a newsreader.

Both functions need a news server prepared to handle them. You should remember that there is no guarantee that no one has already read your article, before it is superseded or canceled.

So first think, then post.

### Cancel

Canceling an article means deleting it from the newsgroup.

Why should you want to cancel an article? Well, perhaps you flamed somebody in a rage and now you want to get this article out of the newsgroup, because you regret what you wrote. A personal insult, read by everybody, looks not too good, especially when you regret it. So there is only one thing, cancel the article.

Select the article you want to cancel and choose Cancel article in the context menu. When you are sure it is the right article, confirm &knode;s question with Yes. Now you are asked if you want to send the Cancel message now or later. For this example we decide to send it Later. You will notice the new message in the folder Outbox.

Now we want to look at the so called cancel message. In the subject you will find something like:

    cancel of <n177m8.1m.ln@konqui.org>

This strange letters between the brackets are the Message-ID of the article, you want to cancel. This message tells the newsserver to delete your article. When you look at complete header of this message by selecting View Show all headers you will notice a line with the name control and the content cancel <xxxxx@ddddd.dd> This line tells the server, this message is a control message. In our case, this message cancels your article.

You can still delete the control message from the Outbox.

Keep in mind, an article can only be identified by his Message-ID. You need this Message-ID if you want to cancel an article. Normally your article gets this Message-ID when it arrives at the newsserver. Thats why you can only cancel an article, when it is already published. The articles in the folder Sent have no Message-ID, so you can not cancel them from there.

There is one exception. If you have configured &knode; to generate a Message-ID, you can cancel you articles in folder Sent, too.

&knode; allows only to cancel your own articles. It refuses to cancel articles from other authors.

Since the cancel feature is so easily fooled, by newsreaders that let you cancel any post, many news servers do not acknowledge cancel messages from posters. Even if your own ISP accepts the cancel and passes it on, many other servers will ignore it and will not pass it on.

You should consider any previously sent article, canceled or not, to be published and publicly available.

### Supersede

Supersede overwrites your article with a new version. One reason for doing this could be:

You have written a long article and already posted it. Now you find an error in this article. You can cancel this article and post a new, corrected, article. Or you can use Supersede.

Select this article in the article view. In the context menu, select Supersede article.... &knode; will ask you, if you really want to overwrite this article. Confirm with Yes and the Composer appears.

In the Composer you can now make the wanted corrections and changes. You can publish this article in the same way as you post every other article. When the newsserver receives this article, it reads some special lines in the header which tell the newsserver to supersede the older article. Select File Send Later for now, because we want to look at the articles header in the Outbox.

Activate View Show all headers, because we want to see all the header, the newsserver receives. You will notice a line like:

Supersedes: <oggcm8.4n5.ln@konqi.org>

This is the instruction for the newsserver for superseding the article with the Message-ID <oggcm8.4n5.ln@konqi.org> with the new article.

Besides this Supersede is used for periodical posted articles, ⪚ a FAQ. The new article supersedes the old one and the newsgroups do not end up with lots of different versions.

Again, using this function is only possible, if the article already has a Message-ID. Normally articles get their by the newsserver. This means, you can only supersede articles, which are already published.

you can configure &knode; to generate this message, then you can supersede your articles in the Outbox, too.

&knode; allows only to supersede your own articles.

As with cancels, supersede messages have been abused in the past, with for example certain parties sending hundreds or even thousands of them to overwrite legitimate posts with random computer generated junk. Again, as with cancels, many news servers do not honor supersede messages, nor do they pass them on.

## Score, watch, ignore

Score, Watch and Ignore are only different names for the same feature.

By scoring a thread, you determine its importance. &knode; allows scores between -100000 and 100000. A normal article will get a score of 0 if you do not change this. So threads with a score below 0 are less important and threads with a score above 0 are more important than the average.

The score is an attribute of the thread and the articles in this thread. So you can use the score for filtering and searching articles. For example, you can define a filter, which shows only articles with a score > 0, that means all articles you are specially interested in.

The function Watch only sets the score of all article in a thread to 100. So they get a high score and &knode; labels them with a special icon.

The function Ignore does the opposite. Ignore scores all articles with -100 and does not show this articles anymore.

The English word scoring is used in many other countries, too.

You can score an article or a thread manual with the right mousebutton or with the menu Scoring. Here you can score with Watch Thread and Ignore Thread directly. Besides you can let &knode; score the articles with scoring rules automatically. You can configure those rules at Settings Configure KNode...Reading News Scoring or at Scoring Edit scoring rules.... The only different of these dialogs is that the last one has the rule-list next to the rule configuration. In the following guide I'm using the editor you get with Scoring Edit scoring rules....

The Rule Composer The Rule Composer

The Rule Composer

The composer consists of 4 areas. On the left side is the list of the rules. With the buttons below the list you can add, delete or copy an existing rule. Below that you have the possibility to limit the rules which are shown. You have the choice to show all rules or only the rules for a special newsgroup.

If you chose a rule-name in the list you will see the rule on the right side. Now you can edit the rule. At the top you can change the name and set the newsgroups this rule is for. You can chose one or more than one group. Several groups must be separated by a semicolon. Furthermore you can chose from the subscribed groups with the drop down list and the Add group button or use regular expressions and wild cards, ⪚ .* for all groups. The option Expire rule automatically makes it possible to delete the rule automatically after the configured number of days. This is senseful if a special person behaves bad and you don't want to read anything from this person for a few days.

In the Condition field you enter the condition which should activate the rule. Normally you can enter only one condition, but you can change this by pressing the buttons More and Fewer. If you have more than one condition, you must tell knode if all conditions must be fulfilled or only one of them. If Match all conditions is activated, all conditions must be fulfilled, if Match any conditions only one of them needs to be be fulfilled.

Every condition consists of 2 drop down lists and a free text. In the first list you chose the part of the message which should be used for the condition. This part will be compared with the text field. And the second drop down list tells &knode; how it's compared. For example, the free text should match the chosen header field exactly or just be a part of it. Regular expressions are allowed, too. If you check Not, the condition is fulfilled if the chosen things are false.

That was the theory, now lets have a look on some examples.

- Maybe you want to filter away all postings of Theodor Test. Therefor you have to chose the header line From, enter his name in the text field and chose that the fields should match. But before doing that you should have a look on the header of an article of Theoder Test and check out, what's in the From line there.

- If you don't want to read articles with more than 100 lines, you can chose the header entry Lines, in the second drop down you chose greater than and enter `100` in the text field. You probably want to score down the message.

- Last example: Of course you're very interested in every article that refers to &knode;. Now you can chose the header entry Subject, contains substring and enter `knode` in the text field. But what do you do if &knode; is not mentioned in the Subject. I suggest to use a regular expression. Change contains substring to matches regular expression and type `knode|newsreader|usenet` in the text field. Alternatively you can make 3 conditions for that and activate Match any condition. But this needs a lot of space and is very inelegant, isn't it?

If your condition is ready you should set an action down in the Actions section. The most important action is adjust score. If this action is chosen, you can raise or lower the score for this articles by the configured value. &knode; can also show you a little message when finding such an article or colorize the header in the article list, You can make interesting articles screeming pink, so you will see them very quickly.

When leaving the editor or choosing the menu item Scoring Recalculate scores the rules are executed. Furthermore the rules are automatically used for new articles. Scoring makes the most sense when used with filters. You score some articles down and filter them away, so they won't appear in the article list.

## Group identities

With &knode; you can use a different identity with every newsgroup you are subscribed to. This involves name, email, reply-to address and signature.

It is easy to set group identities. For setting up a group identity, select the according newsgroup. In the context menu, select Group Properties. The second tab is identical with the global identity settings. Confirm your settings with OK and your articles in this group are always posted with this identity.

When you unsubscribe from a group, you lose the identity settings for this group. If you resubscribe to this group, you have to repeat the settings. For new newsgroups, the global identity is used.

## Managing Multiple News Accounts

&knode; can handle an unlimited number of news server accounts in addition to your main news server. Most users don't need this feature, but it can be very handy to if your main newsserver doesn't provide all groups you want to read. Typical cases are support groups for commercial software that are hosted on a special server or binary newsgroups.

Another example why you sometimes need more than one newsserver is, that there are sometimes not all interesting newsgroups on one server. In fact, there are very often only a selection of newsgroups. For example very many servers doesn't support binary groups with pictures or programs. If you want such a newsgroup and your newsserver provider don't want to serve it, you can configure &knode; to get it from another server.

Or, perhaps you find you are just subscribed to too many newsgroups, and would like to organize them a little better. You could set up several accounts for the same server, perhaps one for groups you read every day, and one for groups you read less often, so that you don't have to search for your everyday groups in a long list of subscribed groups.

In order to add an new account, you have to open the preferences dialog via Settings Configure KNode...Accounts News The buttonNew creates a new account, you then have to enter the same data as for your first account, typically a name for the account, the host name and user name and password combination if the server requires authentication. When this is done the new server will appear both in the configuration dialog and in the group view. You can now subscribe to newsgroups.

You can delete the currently selected account by pressing the Delete button.

With Account properties in the context menu of the newsserver you can chose a special identity for only this newsserver.

## Sign and Verify Articles with PGP

PGP is the most spread method to encrypt or sign data. With the PGP-signature you can verify if the data are really from the original author or if they are changed by others. You will find PGP-programs and guides at http://www.pgpi.org.

With &knode; you are able to sign an article with PGP and to verify a PGP signed article. After you configured the PGP support at Settings Configure Knode...Signing/Verifying, you can sign an article in the editor with the menu item Tools Sign article with PGP. You will be asked for your passphrase and after that the article will be signed.

Your GnuPG/PGP ID is automatically built from your name and your email address and is identically with the sender of the message (From-header).

To verify a PGP-signature you have to chose the menu item View Verify PGP-signature.