37775 - subscribe to newsgroups dialog should support description (charters/taglines/LIST NEWSGROUPS)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

The subscribe dialog should have a checkmark to support the use of description. 
Normally a newsgroup can have description, and currently Mozilla doesn't display 
this.

I really like Outlook Express's way of doing this. It has a check that says: 
"Also search descriptions". When you check this the descriptions are fetched for 
the net and displayed. Actually a small alert is shown before fetching the 
description since it can take quite some time.

Comment 1

[laurel]

Descriptions is listed as a P4 item for this release.

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

marking m20, not going to happen for beta2.

this would be cool, though.

Comment 3

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

these are all subscribe bugs.   accepting.

Comment 4

[Henrik Gemal]

does fetching the description take extra time?

Comment 5

[Bruce Davidson]

*** Bug 108151 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Martin Sch]

NNTP command is "LIST NEWSGROUPS <pattern>"

Comment 7

[Henrik Gemal]

Outlook Express has a checkmark:
[ ] Search Descriptions

we could have the same since getting the descriptions do take extra time.

Comment 8

[Sebastian Späth]

Mmmh, searching the descriptions might be a second step. A first step might be
to display the newsgroup description on the subscribe dialog when a newsgroup is
selected. That might help me to decide whether I want to subscribe a certain
group or not.

Implementing the search of the descriptions might be a separate addition then
later on.

Comment 9

[Henrik Gemal]

what I meant was this. There should just be a "include description". If you
press this checkbox an alert says "This will download the descriptions for the
26.000 newsgroups. This may take some time. Do you want to continue?"
If you do the descriptions are downloaded and stored and could/should be
included when the user do search/subscribe etc...

Comment 10

[Martin Sch]

Since the user never sees 26'000 groups at once, it does not make sense to fetch
26'000 descriptions at once. It is more oeconomical to fetch them when they are
needed, i.e. when a group name is displayed.

Comment 11

[Henrik Gemal]

basiclly it depends on what you're gonna do. If you are gonna search for a group
it's nice to be able to search the descriptions. If you just want to see the
description for a single group then we dont have to fetch all 26.000
descriptions, correct.

Comment 12

[Theblueman]

Outlook express handles decriptions in a reasonable manner.  Pan in Linux
downloads the descriptions without prompting but the descriptions are not
searchable to my knowledge.
I don't think time or the number of newsgroups is an issue since a full download
will occur once and then only for new newsgroup additions which should be
clearly indicated under another tab like netscape 4 (I know this is another bug).

Comment 13

[Matus UHLAR - fantomas]

*** Bug 242165 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Matus UHLAR - fantomas]

If you are initially building your newsgroup account, you might like to search
for string in ALL newsgroup descriptions. Of course it takes some time -
newsgroups file can be 2times bigger than active file, but it is a good start.

The file may be stored locally (maybe compressed, the ratio should be good)
and only new newsgroups descriptions be fetched later (if the server supports mask)

Comment 15

[Matus UHLAR - fantomas]

Also note that some news servers do not support pattern after "LIST NEWSGROUPS"
command (some don't support LIST NEWSGROUPS at all, but that's another story),
so they will probably always send all descriptions. This may take some time and
user should probably be warned about this. However newsgroup descriptions give
users much more informations as pure newsgroup names, so they imho really should
be supported

Comment 16

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I guess this is actually core...

Comment 17

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

*** Bug 335078 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

As I am quickly becoming the resident news expert (at least wrt NNTP), I would like to chime in here.

First, mailnews already has some capabilities to handle descriptions, if you look hard enough. Getting the name PRETTY_NAMES_WANTED and launching into LIST_PRETTY_NAMES will trigger downloading the information... only to discard it all because the front-end can't handle it. That said, it uses an old NNTP draft (LIST PRETTYNAMES where LIST NEWSGROUPS is the proper and actually used version); this is, however, a pretty minor change.

Second, two of the three news servers I tested (my ISP's and news.aioe.org, an implementor of INN, the gold-standard news server impl) supported LIST NEWSGROUPS. news.mozilla.org does not; since it doesn't support XHDR either, its lack of support isn't terribly surprising.

Hooking up the backend properly would take no more than one or two dozen lines, AFAICT, so the biggest component is the UI. I'll be happy to set up the backend if someone else can handle the UI...

Comment 19

[steg]

(In reply to comment #18)
> As I am quickly becoming the resident news expert (at least wrt NNTP), I would
> like to chime in here.

It's a *real pleasure* to see that :)

> Second, two of the three news servers I tested (...)

If you'd like to have access to more news servers for testing purposes http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Usenet/Public_News_Servers/ has useful information and it's up to date.

Comment 20

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

The storage size and data transfer should not be such a big problem nowadays ...

Comment 21

[Al]

A pity this hasn't been addressed yet. It's strange to see a valid post from 2000 stating that Outlook Express can do this, while Thunderbird cannot.

Comment 22

[Lu Wei]

It's a mystery that the feature required by RFC could not be implemented, even after 18 years.

Comment 23

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Perhaps then, you'd be interested in submitting a patch for it?

Comment 24

[Lu Wei]

(In reply to Magnus Melin from comment #23)
> Perhaps then, you'd be interested in submitting a patch for it?

I'd love to if I have necessary knowledge, but I am not a professional programmer. My programming knowledge is mainly on Excel VBA to do engineering calculation.