6.4.3 Slashdot

Slashdot is a popular news site, with lively discussion following the news articles. nnslashdot will let you read this forum in a convenient manner.

The easiest way to read this source is to put something like the following in your `~/.gnus.el' file:

(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnslashdot "")))

This will make Gnus query the nnslashdot back end for new comments and groups. The F command will subscribe each new news article as a new Gnus group, and you can read the comments by entering these groups. (Note that the default subscription method is to subscribe new groups as zombies. Other methods are available (see section 1.6.2 Subscription Methods).

If you want to remove an old nnslashdot group, the G DEL command is the most handy tool (see section 2.9 Foreign Groups).

When following up to nnslashdot comments (or posting new comments), some light HTMLizations will be performed. In particular, text quoted with `> ' will be quoted with blockquote instead, and signatures will have br added to the end of each line. Other than that, you can just write HTML directly into the message buffer. Note that Slashdot filters out some HTML forms.

The following variables can be altered to change its behavior:

nnslashdot-threaded

Whether nnslashdot should display threaded groups or not. The default is t. To be able to display threads, nnslashdot has to retrieve absolutely all comments in a group upon entry. If a threaded display is not required, nnslashdot will only retrieve the comments that are actually wanted by the user. Threading is nicer, but much, much slower than unthreaded.

nnslashdot-login-name

The login name to use when posting.

nnslashdot-password

The password to use when posting.

nnslashdot-directory

Where nnslashdot will store its files. The default is `~/News/slashdot/'.

nnslashdot-active-url

The URL format string that will be used to fetch the information on news articles and comments. The default is
`http://slashdot.org/search.pl?section=&min=%d'.

nnslashdot-comments-url

The URL format string that will be used to fetch comments. The default is `http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=%s&threshold=%d&commentsort=%d&mode=flat&startat=%d'.

nnslashdot-article-url

The URL format string that will be used to fetch the news article. The default is `http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=%s&mode=nocomment'.

nnslashdot-threshold

The score threshold. The default is -1.

nnslashdot-group-number

The number of old groups, in addition to the ten latest, to keep updated. The default is 0.