Both selection and kill filters use the same type of filters (as opposed to display filters, which are a different thing altogether). Both act upon articles, returning a "yes" or "no" answer for whether a given article matches a given filter. For example, you might define a filter to match all articles that are crossposted to more than 3 groups, or a filter to match all articles that are a followup to any article posted by yourself. It is also possible to combine filters using and and or logic to form more complex queries.

There are two main uses for these filters:

• Subsetting groups - This allows you to define different views for looking at any group or set of groups. For example, you might define one view that shows you all the "for sale" articles in a marketplace newsgroup, and another that shows you all the "wanted to buy" posts, and yet a third that shows you articles you have posted and any followups to those articles.

• Killing articles. Kill filters are used to remove various postings permanently. After articles are killed, you never see them again no matter how you chose to view the group's articles. This is useful to remove "spam" type posts. For example, it's extremely unlikely that any post containing "Make Money Fast" or "$$$$" in the title is worth reading. You can define a kill filter to remove such posts.

Proper use of kill and selection filters can greatly increase the signal to noise ratio of usenet. NewsRog provides unusually powerful selection and kill filter capabilities compared to almost any other newsreader.

This section of the documentation discusses general filter topics. The specifics of each different type of filter are covered in the reference section of this documentation.

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A filter may be added by double clicking on it's name in the popup list. The list may be closed without adding a filter by clicking the Add button again. Note that you are not limited to one instance of each type of filter. You might, for example, add several Header Match filters for different purposes.

Removing filters is a simple matter of selecting those to be removed and using the Delete button.

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The user interface for any filter may be called up by either double clicking on the name of the filter in the filter list, or by using the Edit button.

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• Filter Settings - This is where you edit information specific to this particular filter. What appears here will differ depending on the type of filter in question.

• Global Info - This area edits data common to all types of filters.

• Stats - This area displays certain statistics pertaining to this particular filter, such as how many articles it has matched.

The following features are available here:

• The filter description is any short string that will remind you of the purpose of this filter. Filters can be toggled on and off individually to change your view of a particular group, and this name can serve to remind you what a particular filter does.

• The Expire Date, if turned on, is a specific date on which this filter will expire and be deleted. This is handy for creating filters that last a certain fixed period of time (say, one month) and then disappear.

• The Expire Disuse setting is similar, but will expire filters that have not matched anything in a certain period of time. For example, let's say you create a filter to kill all posts to a certain thread. When people stop posting to this thread after some days, weeks or months, it would be annoying to have to manually track and delete the kill filter for that thread. But with NewsRog, you can have this happen automatically. By setting this value to, say, 7 days, a filter will disappear automatically if it hasn't matched any articles in the past 7 days.

• The Enable checkbox toggles this filter on or off. Filters that are not enabled have no effect; they simply are not used.

• The Invert checkbox inverts the sense of the filter; all articles it would normally match are not matched, and vice versa. This way you can easily define filters that match all articles except those specified by the filter criteria.

The filte description may also be changed by typing into the name box in a filter list when a particular filter is selected. The Enabled and Invert options may be toggled on and off from the filter list by clicking in the appropriate column of the list:

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The Total History area presents a cumulative count of the number of successful and attempted matches for this filter. For example, if there are 100 articles in a group, and a particular filter matches 35 of them, then the components of the Total History area will increment by 35 and 100 respectively each time the filter is used.

The Last Use area is similar, but it resets for each use of the filter. For example, if you perform some operation in the group window's user interface that requires re-running filters, the Last Use area statistics will reset each time.

The Last Match is the date on which the filter last successfully matched any article. This is used to determine when to expire articles that use the Expire Disuse feature.

Pressing the Reset button will reset all the statistics to zero.

Pressing the Update button will update the Last Match date to today's date. This way you can "force" a filter that would have otherwise expired to start it's internal clock over, so to speak.

Some other filter statistics such as a percentage match number are available from the filter lists.

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• What selection and kill filters are.
• The difference between selection and kill filters.
• What filter scope refers to, and the difference between global and group specific filters.
• How to add and remove filters.
• How to edit a particular filter's parameters.
• How to change a filter's description.
• How to create auto-expiring filters.
• The difference between a set expire date and expiring after a certain period of disuse.
• How to enable and disable filters.
• How to invert the sense of a filter's comparison.
• What statistics are tracked about filters.