Filter on downloads

[vbwyrde]

Hi to the Developers!

Great job!   One thing I'd like to suggest:  A filter on the downloads so that you can download only the messages that you want... ie Date Range, Message Text, Author.   That would be awesome.  Thanks again!

- Mark

[Wilson Logan]

Thats doable.

I shall add it to the development queue.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[vbwyrde]

Hi to the Developers!  

Well, you guys have got it going on!  I really appreciate PG Offline.  Just wondering if you have any kind of time-line for the Download Filter - I have a group that has 200000 messages and I really only want to download the ones I need (ie - those from a certain date forward, and any which have my name in them, etc).   Any thoughts on when this might become available?  Thanks again!   Great products!!

vbwyrde

[Wilson Logan]

Hi,

I've been thinking about this and now that I think about it, there are certain problems... or more accurately, it depends on what you want.

If you want the download to be faster then that isn't going to happen. In order to 'know' that you are the author, PG Offline has to first download the message. This means that a filtered download will be slower as it has to download the message & then decide whether to discard it or not.

If you want to just avoid having to later do a search and delete then, yes, it will solve that.

At the moment you can restrict the messages downloaded to a range in Groups--> Group Settings --> Download Settings. You could then sort by Author in the main message list screen and delete everyone elses messages. After that you'd need to do a search for words you're interested in and then it gets complicated...

Cheers,

Wilson.

[vbwyrde]

Ahhh... so you download the message first.  Ok.  Hmmm... well from my point of view (and not speaking for anyone else of course), I don't mind it being slow.  After all I am using this as an archive utility mostly and don't really use it transactionally (to send messages back to the group).  I would do that if I felt that the interface could format the outgoing messages better than Yahoo does (which is pretty crappy), but I haven't tried that yet.   Anyway, I'm not sure how I would feel about this if I did, and I'm wondering if that would influence my thinking... anyway, the main objective for me would be to filter out the messages I don't want from the group.  I could even possibly live with the idea that it would take over night to get the initial list (for large groups that have been around for years there can be hundreds of thousands of messages potentially).   The key, I guess, would be to ensure that the drive has enough space to process the files.  

On the other hand, not knowing your code and how Yahoo Groups works, I'm a little blind on suggestions, BUT... if it would be possible to query the message before the actual download then that might be faster and also it would mitigate the potential disk-space issue.   I have not even tried to download the large group I have in mind (200000 messages) yet.   I'm a little scared to even try that.  

So the upshot is, thinking about this from the users point of view, I want to be able to go to a large group and just get the messages that either pertain to me or by date.  Keyword searches, yeah, I could see that as kind of tricky there so I'd say it would be reasonable to skip that feature since you can still do a keyword search after the files are downloaded.   In this case, for the client side keyword search (I don't have the program here so I can't experiment - thus forgive me as I guess at this) I would make it have an include and exclude capability, and also an "Invert Selection" so that I can grab the stuff I want and delete the ones I don't want more easily.  

Ok, well I hope this helps clarify what I'm thinking of.  Again, I'm afraid I'm guessing at this at the moment, but when I get home I'll double check stuff and let you know what I think.  

Anway, thanks for the responses.   Much Obliged!

vbwyrde

[Wilson Logan]

Hi,

I suggest that you download your 200000 messages in chunks of no more than 12000. You can set a download/wait/repeat cycle in File-->Options--> Download

Perhaps set it to download 4000 and wait an hour?

You'll need to play with it to see what you can get away with.

Cheers,

Wilson.