Sorry to confess that after poring over all the
Jim Bradley pages, older saved posts on filters,
etc., I am unable to create a lsimple kill filter.

I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
all but a few select posters?

Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
the filter? An explanation would be nice.

I tried all sorts of things for a single poster and
even they failed -- did not wrong thing or it was
a syntax error.

Author: ^Peter -- simply killed everything, including
all of Peter's posts.
Varitations like Author: not(Peter) did not fly at all.
Same with Auhtor: !Peter

Thanks for your help.

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On Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:31:38 -0500, Charlie Roberts
<croberts@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Sorry to confess that after poring over all the
>Jim Bradley pages, older saved posts on filters,
>etc., I am unable to create a lsimple kill filter.
>
>
>I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
>task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
>all but a few select posters?
>
>Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
>Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
>that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
>the filter? An explanation would be nice.
>
>I tried all sorts of things for a single poster and
>even they failed -- did not wrong thing or it was
>a syntax error.
>
>Author: ^Peter -- simply killed everything, including
>all of Peter's posts.
>Varitations like Author: not(Peter) did not fly at all.
>Same with Auhtor: !Peter
>
>Thanks for your help.

Also, I find that

Author: ^{Peter} kills only Peter's posts (that
exact opposite of what I want!) while

Author: {^Peter} kills everything.

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In Message-ID:<8au4sih4s312q96ggqmivfi4dr9i80ur5b@4ax.com>,
Charlie Roberts <croberts@gmail.com> wrote:

>I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
>task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
>all but a few select posters?
>
>Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
>Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
>that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
>the filter? An explanation would be nice.

Agent will use the highest priority filter that matches the message,
and finish there. It will never apply two filters.

So, the easiest way is probably to make a high priority watch filter
(with any watch action) for those 5 users. Then make a lower priority
kill filter which matches everyone.

It can be done in one filter, but why complicate things? And,
especially, why use a filter you'll come back to in a few years and
not understand?

Tricky code requires good comments. The cleverest code is when the
reader asks "Why didn't I think of that?"
- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz

--
Arthur T. - ar23hur "at" pobox "dot" com

On Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:31:38 -0500, Charlie Roberts
<croberts@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Sorry to confess that after poring over all the
>Jim Bradley pages, older saved posts on filters,
>etc., I am unable to create a lsimple kill filter.
>
>
>I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
>task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
>all but a few select posters?
>
>Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
>Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
>that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
>the filter? An explanation would be nice.
>
>I tried all sorts of things for a single poster and
>even they failed -- did not wrong thing or it was
>a syntax error.
>
>Author: ^Peter -- simply killed everything, including
>all of Peter's posts.
>Varitations like Author: not(Peter) did not fly at all.
>Same with Auhtor: !Peter
>
>Thanks for your help.

For a group with too many contributors -
What I found functional was to set it up so that filters
said to only download the bodies of posts for users I named -
eventually, several dozen. I did my reading by skipping to
posts with bodies.

All the headers would be there. For an interesting post,
I could hit return for its immediate Reply or highlight
multiple Replies and hit return.

Lately, posts are few enough that I download them all.

--
Rich Ulrich

On Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:31:38 -0500, Charlie Roberts wrote:

> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272
>
> Sorry to confess that after poring over all the
> Jim Bradley pages, older saved posts on filters,
> etc., I am unable to create a lsimple kill filter.
>
>
> I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
> task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
> all but a few select posters?
>
> Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
> Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
> that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
> the filter? An explanation would be nice.

Try this:

not Author: ( "Abel Bro" or "Chill Drop" or "Ellie Fritz" or "George Hall" or "Ingio Jacob" )

> I tried all sorts of things for a single poster and
> even they failed -- did not wrong thing or it was
> a syntax error.
>
> Author: ^Peter -- simply killed everything, including
> all of Peter's posts.

This filter is the same as writing

Author: Peter

The ^ character will have no effect here in a word-based expression
filter. In a word-based expression, the ^ is treated as part of the
space between words. The word-based expression ^Peter does *not*
mean 'not Peter'.

For the places where the ^ character does have a special meaning, see
the footnote further below.

> Varitations like Author: not(Peter) did not fly at all.

Make that one of these...
not Author: (Peter)
Author: (not Peter)

See: Help >> Index >> Filters, Message Filters >> Agent's Expression Language

> Same with Auhtor: !Peter

Make that one of these...
!Author: Peter
Author: (!Peter)

> Thanks for your help.

____
FOOTNOTE

In filter expressions, there are two places where the ^ character has
a special meaning. The meaning is quite different in each case.

1. Inside the {...} curly braces of a regular expression filter,
where ^ represents the beginning of the field.

For example, the expression
Author: {^Peter}
will match a message where the "From:" field *begins* with Peter.

See: Help >> Index >> Expressions >> Regular Expressions Reference >> Rules for Writing Regular Expressions >> The ^ (carat) character, which matches the beginning of the field being tested.

2. Immediately after the [ left square bracket of a [...] range
inside a {...} regular expression. If a range begins with a ^
character, it matches any single character not in the specified
range.

For example, the expression
Author: {P[^ae]ter}
will match P%ter, P&ter, P*ter, Pbter, Pcter, Pdter, Pfter, etc.,
but not Pater or Peter. The range [^ae] will match any single
character which is not 'a' or 'e'.

The ^ does not negate which words match, so it *cannot* be used to
say the author is not Peter. It only applies to matching a single
character in a specified range.

See: Help >> Index >> Expressions >> Regular Expressions Reference >> Rules for Writing Regular Expressions >> A "range" of characters, enclosed in [...] square brackets.

--
Kind regards
Ralph Fox
🦊

All's lost that's put in a riven dish.

On Wed, 07 Feb 2024 18:40:58 +1300, Ralph Fox <-rf-nz-@-.invalid>
wrote:

>On Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:31:38 -0500, Charlie Roberts wrote:
>
>> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272
>>
>> ......
>> I would like to ask how to do the following (simple?!)
>> task. How does one eliminate (i.e. kill) posts from
>> all but a few select posters?
>>
>> Suppose there are five posters Abel Bro, Chill
>> Drop, Ellie Fritz, George Hall and Ingio Jacob
>> that I want to see and kill the rest. What is
>> the filter? An explanation would be nice.
>
>Try this:
>
> not Author: ( "Abel Bro" or "Chill Drop" or "Ellie Fritz" or "George Hall" or "Ingio Jacob" )

Thanks, Ralph!

In hindsight, it is "Of course".

The thing is that I never could learn Agent's RE stuff as the Help
pages are more tutorial in fashion than manual ... and I am bad
at that. Further, the Unix RE stuff keeps getting in the way,
even though I know that Agent's RE is not quite the same.

Putting the "not" operator in front in the key ...

So many NGs are withering away now (sci.math is a primary
example) that these "kill everyone but ...." filters may
become the norm. Sad.

Thanks, again.

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On Wed, 07 Feb 2024 11:02:29 -0500, Charlie Roberts wrote:

> Thanks, Ralph!

You're welcome.