On 20.12.2022 at 05:29, Mike Easter scribbled:

> Aragorn wrote:
> >
> > our old friend Marek Novotny has requested that I'd say "hi" to the
> > people he knew while he was a Usenet resident.
>
> Interesting. Tnx.
>
> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
> Why in q-p?

I don't know, I haven't done anything to specify that. I'm guessing
it must be a default setting in Claws Mail somewhere when I start a
new thread — which I rarely ever do.

I use KMail for email, but I use Claws Mail for Usenet. I would have
preferred Pan, but Pan appears to be very unstable in Manjaro — it's a
package we pull in directly from Arch. I've tried building it from
(Arch's) sources on my own computer, but the result was the same; it
crashes upon downloading the headers when freshly subscribing to a
newsgroup.

Claws isn't all that stable either, but it crashes far less. And
Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — it doesn't even recognize
crossposts, and its filtering abilities are ridiculously inadequate for
Usenet.

That all said, I myself am not all that active on Usenet anymore either,
and I've actually been pondering leaving it all behind, after 23 years.

Usenet isn't what it used to be anymore, and I've got far too many
other things on my mind than wading through pages and pages of unsnipped
quoted material all the time in order to then find only a single
original sentence at the bottom of any given post.

If there is no original content within the first 10 lines or so, then I
simply skip the post without reading it, and it was only about six
weeks to two months ago that I completely abandoned alt.os.linux —
where I had also been a resident for over two decades — because it was
being spammed to death by US-political bigots in a massive crossposted
thread, with my filters seemingly unable to keep it from my view.

Most of the people I've gotten to know over the years have moved on
toward greener pastures, so there isn't much of an incentive for me to
still be sticking around anyway.

As it is, at the moment I'm still here and mostly lurking, but I don't
know for how much longer. :-/

--
With respect,
= Aragorn

On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:36:25 +0100, Aragorn wrote:

>Snip

> I use KMail for email, but I use Claws Mail for Usenet. I would have
> preferred Pan, but Pan appears to be very unstable in Manjaro — it's a
> package we pull in directly from Arch. I've tried building it from
> (Arch's) sources on my own computer, but the result was the same; it
> crashes upon downloading the headers when freshly subscribing to a
> newsgroup.
>

Just curious what version of Pan you tried out. I'm using Pan 0.145 on
LMDE 5 and it is pretty solid so far, no crashes, no loading or posting
issues. I cannot say the same for Pan 0.146, that is pretty buggy, one of
the biggest issues with it is I cannot post to a newsgroup either a
followup or new post. So I've locked my system to stay on Pan 0.145.

>Snip

--
Pull my finger

Aragorn wrote:
> Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — it doesn't even recognize
> crossposts, and its filtering abilities are ridiculously inadequate for
> Usenet.

Those are very true and very big deficiencies for a newsreader which is
all I use Tb for.

However, Claws won't compose/send in format=flowed and won't
reformat/rewrap, both of which I consider my preferences for usenet.
Claws will only 'respect' format=flowed (not create) which isn't enough
for me. Claws also has a problem about how it does quotes. A single
quote character should be followed by a space, but 'nested' or stacked
quotes should not have 'extra' spaces like that.

So, I'm stuck w/ Tb deficiencies because I won't accept such as Claws
deficiencies; it is a matter of 'choice'. Tb is also 'bloated' because
of its policy of considering itself an html composer/renderer email
agent which marries it to that moz engine.

Back to your topic; does Marek participate in any 'online' activities
(blogs, forums) related to his interest in languages?

--
Mike Easter

On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:21:23 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:
> Aragorn wrote:
>> Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — it doesn't even recognize
>> crossposts, and its filtering abilities are ridiculously inadequate for
>> Usenet.
>
> Those are very true and very big deficiencies for a newsreader which is
> all I use Tb for.
>
> However, Claws won't compose/send in format=flowed and won't
> reformat/rewrap, both of which I consider my preferences for usenet.
> Claws will only 'respect' format=flowed (not create) which isn't enough
> for me. Claws also has a problem about how it does quotes. A single
> quote character should be followed by a space, but 'nested' or stacked
> quotes should not have 'extra' spaces like that.
>
> So, I'm stuck w/ Tb deficiencies because I won't accept such as Claws
> deficiencies; it is a matter of 'choice'. Tb is also 'bloated' because
> of its policy of considering itself an html composer/renderer email
> agent which marries it to that moz engine.

Hehe, I use slrn as my Usenet client.
https://slrn.info/links.html

You can set SLRN_EDITOR=editor_of_your_choice_here
and when you post/reply you will be in the editor of choice.

Bit Twister wrote:
> Hehe, I use slrn as my Usenet client.
> https://slrn.info/links.html
>
> You can set SLRN_EDITOR=editor_of_your_choice_here
> and when you post/reply you will be in the editor of choice.

Long ago I considered messing around w/ slrn, back when Andrew had slrn
pages on his 'little corner of the web' which has since been brought
into Ub Help.

My favorite text-interface news (&mail) agent is Alpine because of the
way it has integrated its help and configuration into its interface. I
always felt that strategy would be a good one for slrn and some other
text-based tools.

I can't think of any text editors including those in mail/news agents
which can easily reformat w/o 'building' some kind of regex or algo or
macro to do it. Tb's isn't 'perfect' but it is pretty good.

--
Mike Easter

On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 13:18:31 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:
> Bit Twister wrote:
>> Hehe, I use slrn as my Usenet client.
>> https://slrn.info/links.html
>>
>> You can set SLRN_EDITOR=editor_of_your_choice_here
>> and when you post/reply you will be in the editor of choice.
>
> Long ago I considered messing around w/ slrn, back when Andrew had slrn
> pages on his 'little corner of the web' which has since been brought
> into Ub Help.

Yeah, I have to pull it from sourceforge, and build it for secure connections
to NNTPSERVER=snews://reader443.eternal-september.org

> I can't think of any text editors including those in mail/news agents
> which can easily reformat w/o 'building' some kind of regex or algo or
> macro to do it. Tb's isn't 'perfect' but it is pretty good.

Me thinks slrn just adds the reply level indicators and calls editor
of choice.

Currently using geany as my editor.

On 20.12.2022 at 18:10, Killadebug scribbled:

> On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:36:25 +0100, Aragorn wrote:
>
> > I use KMail for email, but I use Claws Mail for Usenet. I would
> > have preferred Pan, but Pan appears to be very unstable in Manjaro
> > — it's a package we pull in directly from Arch. I've tried
> > building it from (Arch's) sources on my own computer, but the
> > result was the same; it crashes upon downloading the headers when
> > freshly subscribing to a newsgroup.
>
> Just curious what version of Pan you tried out. I'm using Pan 0.145
> on LMDE 5 and it is pretty solid so far, no crashes, no loading or
> posting issues. I cannot say the same for Pan 0.146, that is pretty
> buggy, one of the biggest issues with it is I cannot post to a
> newsgroup either a followup or new post. So I've locked my system to
> stay on Pan 0.145.

Oh gosh, I don't remember the version anymore. That was way back in May
2019, after I had just installed Manjaro. I came from several years
of PCLinuxOS at that point in time, where I had been using Pan without
any problems — I liked its filtering, and how easy it was to edit the
score file.

But back then, Pan on Manjaro was problematic, and it appeared as if I
was also the only person on the support forum who actually still
monitored Usenet — I doubt whether that will have changed in the
meantime — so I couldn't really get any advice or support there.

I was also not involved with Manjaro itself yet at that point, and thus
I also didn't know that the Pan in the Manjaro repository was simply the
Arch package that was literally imported. But I was given the advice
by a now former staff member to try the version in the AUR — the Arch
User Repository, which contains user-maintained build scripts that pull
in the upstream sources, whatever the upstream may be — and so I built
it from scratch, but it was still just as broken as the one from the
binary package.

I then tried Thunderbird as an alternative for a while, but like I
said, Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — even though it supports
Usenet, it was never designed to be anything more than an email client.
And then that's when I installed Claws Mail. It's not that great as a
newsreader either, but at least it's usable, and it's better than
Thunderbird.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn

On 20.12.2022 at 11:21, Mike Easter scribbled:

> Aragorn wrote:
> > Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — it doesn't even recognize
> > crossposts, and its filtering abilities are ridiculously inadequate
> > for Usenet.
>
> Those are very true and very big deficiencies for a newsreader which
> is all I use Tb for.
>
> However, Claws won't compose/send in format=flowed and won't
> reformat/rewrap, both of which I consider my preferences for usenet.

It doesn't do "format=flowed", but it does rewrap. However, it takes
some minor intervention from the user. You have to put the cursor on a
space between two words, delete the space and then retype it. This
will automatically rewrap the text, albeit that it doesn't work well
with nested quotes.
> Claws will only 'respect' format=flowed (not create) which isn't
> enough for me. Claws also has a problem about how it does quotes. A
> single quote character should be followed by a space, but 'nested' or
> stacked quotes should not have 'extra' spaces like that.
>
> So, I'm stuck w/ Tb deficiencies because I won't accept such as Claws
> deficiencies; it is a matter of 'choice'. Tb is also 'bloated'
> because of its policy of considering itself an html composer/renderer
> email agent which marries it to that moz engine.

Yes, Thunderbird is really Firefox under the hood. That's another
gripe I have with it: that whole HTML business.

> Back to your topic; does Marek participate in any 'online' activities
> (blogs, forums) related to his interest in languages?

Only on Facebook, I believe, but not under the name Marek Novotny, and
he wants to keep his real identity a secret — for obvious reasons, i.e.
he has been dealing with a stalker for many years now, and that was the
main reason he abandoned both Usenet and his YouTube channel.

I know his real name, but I promised him I'm not going to reveal it,
and so I won't.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn

Bit Twister <BitTwister@mouse-potato.com> writes:

> On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:21:23 -0800, Mike Easter wrote:
>> Aragorn wrote:
>>> Thunderbird is a horrible newsreader — it doesn't even recognize
>>> crossposts, and its filtering abilities are ridiculously inadequate for
>>> Usenet.
>>
>> Those are very true and very big deficiencies for a newsreader which is
>> all I use Tb for.
>>
>> However, Claws won't compose/send in format=flowed and won't
>> reformat/rewrap, both of which I consider my preferences for usenet.
>> Claws will only 'respect' format=flowed (not create) which isn't enough
>> for me. Claws also has a problem about how it does quotes. A single
>> quote character should be followed by a space, but 'nested' or stacked
>> quotes should not have 'extra' spaces like that.
>>
>> So, I'm stuck w/ Tb deficiencies because I won't accept such as Claws
>> deficiencies; it is a matter of 'choice'. Tb is also 'bloated' because
>> of its policy of considering itself an html composer/renderer email
>> agent which marries it to that moz engine.
>
>
> Hehe, I use slrn as my Usenet client.
> https://slrn.info/links.html
>
> You can set SLRN_EDITOR=editor_of_your_choice_here
> and when you post/reply you will be in the editor of choice.

I use gnus as my Usenet client. You can set it to use whatever editor
you like, although I find that emacs works just fine for editing posts.
:-)

I use vim for all of my other editing though.

On 2022-12-20, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:

> Long ago I considered messing around w/ slrn, back when Andrew had
> slrn pages on his 'little corner of the web' which has since been
> brought into Ub Help.

Every time I rewrite a section of that web site I wonder if I should
write some more slrn information but I have not done so yet. Partly
because Usenet has slowed down so much I guess.

Mind you I am retired now so I should make a final effort with slrn
documentation...

Andrew
--
You think that's air you're breathing now?

On 23 Dec 2022 05:18:14 GMT, andrew wrote:

> On 2022-12-20, Mike Easter <MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Long ago I considered messing around w/ slrn, back when Andrew had
>> slrn pages on his 'little corner of the web' which has since been
>> brought into Ub Help.
>
> Every time I rewrite a section of that web site I wonder if I should
> write some more slrn information but I have not done so yet. Partly
> because Usenet has slowed down so much I guess.
>
> Mind you I am retired now so I should make a final effort with slrn
> documentation...
>
> Andrew

Don't worry mate, we're happy to use 'tin' instead.