gnus: Filtering New Groups
1.4.3 Filtering New Groups
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A nice and portable way to control which new newsgroups should be
subscribed (or ignored) is to put an “options” line at the start of the
‘.newsrc’ file. Here’s an example:
options -n !alt.all !rec.all sci.all
This line obviously belongs to a serious-minded intellectual
scientific person (or she may just be plain old boring), because it says
that all groups that have names beginning with ‘alt’ and ‘rec’ should be
ignored, and all groups with names beginning with ‘sci’ should be
subscribed. Gnus will not use the normal subscription method for
subscribing these groups. ‘gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method’ is
used instead. This variable defaults to
‘gnus-subscribe-alphabetically’.
The “options -n” format is very simplistic. The syntax above is all
that is supports: you can force-subscribe hierarchies, or you can deny
hierarchies, and that’s it.
If you don’t want to mess with your ‘.newsrc’ file, you can just set
the two variables ‘gnus-options-subscribe’ and
‘gnus-options-not-subscribe’. These two variables do exactly the same
as the ‘.newsrc’ ‘options -n’ trick. Both are regexps, and if the new
group matches the former, it will be unconditionally subscribed, and if
it matches the latter, it will be ignored.
Yet another variable that meddles here is
‘gnus-auto-subscribed-groups’. It works exactly like
‘gnus-options-subscribe’, and is therefore really superfluous, but I
thought it would be nice to have two of these. This variable is more
meant for setting some ground rules, while the other variable is used
more for user fiddling. By default this variable makes all new groups
that come from mail back ends (‘nnml’, ‘nnbabyl’, ‘nnfolder’, ‘nnmbox’,
‘nnmh’, ‘nnimap’, and ‘nnmaildir’) subscribed. If you don’t like that,
just set this variable to ‘nil’.
As if that wasn’t enough, ‘gnus-auto-subscribed-categories’ also
allows you to specify that new groups should be subscribed based on the
category their select methods belong to. The default is ‘(mail
post-mail)’, meaning that all new groups from mail-like backends should
be subscribed automatically.
New groups that match these variables are subscribed using
‘gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method’.
Info Catalog
gnus: Subscription Methods
gnus: New Groups