132247 - Aliases for newsgroup-names in folder pane

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Jörg Skottke]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.9+) Gecko/20020317
BuildID:    2002031716

If you have newsgroup names such as
"comp.os.myfunkyOS.programming.features.something.brandnew" the names are cut of
to something like "c.o.m.p.f.s.brandnew". This is a major pain to read.

It should be possible to set an alias for the group like "New features" which is
displayed instead of the true name of the newsgroup. An Entryfield for this
could be located in the "settings" to a specific newsgroup.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Look at the newsgroups-list in the sidebar and suffer ;-)
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Morten Nilsen]

I'm sure this is allready filed, but I can't find it just now...

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Wouldn't bug 61794 and bug 61795 solve your problem?  In my opinion having an
alias would be confusing, but perhaps that's just because I'm already used to
the hierarchy formats.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Confirming, setting to RFE, but I really doubt we'll ever do this.

Comment 4

[Stephen Pride]

I think this would actually be a good feature.  As the author points out, the
heirarchial newsgroup names can be a pain to view at times, and a renaming
convention would be good - (e.g., naming 'comp.lang.java' to just 'Java'). 
Another reason may be for privacy (i.e., wondering eyes looking over your
subscription list that you may not want them to view).

Apart from the enhancement, when someone right-clicks on a newsgroup, one of the
options is to "Rename Folder ...".  However, it doesn't do anything in this
regard (that I can tell).

Comment 5

[jofin]

I don't understand why this isn't implemented yet. It's very annoying to have to
click on all folders to find the newsgroup you want, if the groups have the same
abbreviation and are too long to be displayed complete.
For me it's the only reason NOT to use Mozilla MailNews.

Comment 6

[Gareth Young]

Currently this is the only thing stopping me from using Thunderbird for my
default NNTP client. The ability to create an alias for a group is (I think) an
important feature to NNTP client.

For those windows users out there looking for an NNTP client try Xananews
(http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/d9xananews.htm) which is very good and feature
rich. Unfortunatly this isn't available on Linux which is why I was hoping to
use Thunderbird, but because I can't create aliases for groups I'll have to use
something else. :-(  

Comment 7

[jofin]

*** Bug 272675 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[jofin]

Will Mozilla/Thunderbird ever become a usable newsreader? Obviously not. This
enhancement has been filed 3.5 years ago. This was before Mozilla 1.0. Now there
is Thunderbird 1.5 and nothing has been done since then.

Comment 9

[Karsten Düsterloh]

For years now, MailNews has a severe lack of developers. So, your best chance
currently is "We accept patches!". :-|

Comment 10

[jofin]

Unfortunately I'm not able to develop a patch. Since this feature also has not been added to Thunderbird 2.0, I would appreciate very much if someone could add a patch or tell a workaround. I'm still not able to find a solution. 
Besides this Thunderbird is great. I wonder why over the years so many nice but unnecessary features have been added but not this very useful one.

Comment 13

[Lu Wei]

Could this bug's product field also includes Thunderbird?