240209 - Add Mark All Newsgroups Read to newsserver context menu

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Andy Grover]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

I subscribe to 30+ newsgroups that I *try* to keep up with. Sometimes I fail,
and many of them have lots of unread messages. Instead of having to use the
context menu for each group to mark it read, I'd like an option on the server's
menu to mark ALL groups as read.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Ali Ebrahim]

I'm in the same situation as the reporter. I'd love to see this. It's somewhat
of a usability blocker for me.

Comment 2

[Matthew Mastracci]

This one might not be too bad.  I think it's just a matter of adding the
following to mailContextMenus.js:

 var isNewsgroup = !isServer && serverType == 'nntp';
+var isNewsServer = isServer && serverType == 'nntp';

....

 ShowMenuItem("folderPaneContext-markNewsgroupAllRead", (numSelected <= 1) &&
isNewsgroup);
 EnableMenuItem("folderPaneContext-markNewsgroupAllRead", true);
+ShowMenuItem("folderPaneContext-markNewsServerAllRead", (numSelected <= 1) &&
isNewsServer);
+EnableMenuItem("folderPaneContext-markNewsServerAllRead", true);

The C++ changes would be overridding nsMsgDBFolder::MarkAllMessagesRead(void) to
recursively call MarkAllMessagesRead() on each of the server's newgroups.

I'm hoping to tackle bug 174908, so this might be a good starter bug for me to
try out.

Comment 3

[Matthew Mastracci]

Attachment: Patch for bug 240209

Implements a fix for bug 240209 for both Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail

Comment 4

[Matthew Mastracci]

I've attached a potential patch for this issue.  I'm not certain if this is the
absolute-correct way of doing things, since it does kind of subvert the "Mark
All Messages as Read" to do a recursive mark-all-as-read.  It does, however,
work as you would expect.

This is my first true Mozilla patch - I've tried to follow the guidelines at
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/life-cycle.html, but I may have missed something.  

Let me know if the patch is acceptable!

Comment 5

[Nicolas Moreau]

Attachment: Add "mark all newsgroup read" to context menu

Comment 6

[Nicolas Moreau]

Sorry for the spam,

i just only want to add that this extension is made for Thunderbird 0.7 +

Bugs 189277 and 250070 make this extension not easy to use because you have to
select one-by-one each groups, and then select "mark all newsgroup read" from
one group

Comment 7

[Matthew Mastracci]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q294807
----

Several frequently-seen status codes have "friendly" error messages that
Internet Explorer 5.x displays and that effectively mask the actual text message
that the server sends. However, these "friendly" error messages are only
displayed if the response that is sent to the client is less than a specified
threshold. For example, to see the exact text of an HTTP 500 response, the
content length must be greater than or equal to 512 bytes. 

Comment 8

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

I'd love to have it.

Comment 9

[Scott MacGregor]

Nicolas, how does the extension compare to the patch made by Matthew, Matthew may have already done all the work we need for this bug...

Comment 10

[Matthew Mastracci]

Has anyone given my patch a try recently?  I haven't tried applying it to any recent builds, so I don't know if it has bitrotted or broken.

Comment 11

[Scott MacGregor]

Magnus might be interested in unbitrotting the patch and seeing how well it works on the trunk.

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: unbitrotted patch

Unbitrotted patch for thunderbird, with a few tweaks. 

It doesn't work quite properly however, for some reason it will only mark approx 1/3 of the groups on a server as read. Don't know if bug 189277 and bug 250070 mentioned earlier have anything to do with it.

Comment 13

[Ronald Killmer]

This feature is available in both Tb2 and Shredder but appears to be broken.  

Selecting the Right Click context of a News Account results in no action taken if the condition is the groups have new messages. Only old unread are processed.  It appears the "Has New" property set on a group is blocking.

This is preventing the Tb/Shredder equivalent of the OE Catchup feature.

I am reconfirming the bug. Importance is at least Normal.
Whiteboard [patchlove] [helpwanted]

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Joshua, any thoughts re: comment 12?
Magnus, are you still interested in driving this in?

Comment 15

[Ronald Killmer]

I am adding some additional observations to comment #13.  Use of the Account Right Click "Mark all Groups" does bring up a confirmation dialog. On confirmation the unread icons toggle to read, yet the Folder Pane Unread number does not clear.  The action is only valid for the current session.

On restart all previously marked messages are restored to Unread. Additionaly, after all messages had there icons toggled, manually restoring the Unread of a posting caused the Folder Pane numbers to climb as if more new messages had been acquired.

We seem to have to failures here.  One is the Read state is not persisted between sessions.  The other is the Folder Pane is not being refreshed to reflect the new read state. Together this indicates needed file writes did not take place.

Comment 16

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Ron: I think that's some extension you're using... No such feature in core.

Comment 18

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to comment #12)
> It doesn't work quite properly however, for some reason it will only mark
> approx 1/3 of the groups on a server as read. Don't know if bug 189277 and bug
> 250070 mentioned earlier have anything to do with it. 

To be precise, the underlying issue is a fundamental split in how news downloads messages: the expansion only downloads counts so that actual messages are not downloaded until the folder is focused. This is for historical reasons that I think are no longer needed (downloading takes too much bandwidth). I've been using bug 311774 as a proxy for this issue (since that is where I would upload a patch for the issue).

Comment 19

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Another point to bring up is that this bug probably shouldn't be fixed until after bug 311774 if only because this feature won't work correctly until at least after that point.

Comment 20

[Ronald Killmer]

Reply to Comment #16
You are right, and I tracked it down to the old "Newsworthy for Thunderbird 1.5 version 0.2.0.4" So the extension is now broken, done in by being unmaintained. Drats, it was the only tool with easy UI access to some news tweaks. The AMO description does not identify this 'Mark Group as Read' feature as one the extension provided, so I have thought it was a mailnews core function.

Well back to ground zero on helping to sorting this.

Comment 21

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Comment on attachment 271886 [details] [diff] [review]
unbitrotted patch

Patch has bitrotted.

$ patch --dry-run < ~/Desktop/tbTestPatches/240209.diff 
patching file mailContextMenus.js
Hunk #1 FAILED at 303.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 341.
2 out of 2 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file mailContextMenus.js.rej
patching file mailWindowOverlay.xul
Hunk #1 FAILED at 781.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file mailWindowOverlay.xul.rej
can't find file to patch at input line 86
Perhaps you should have used the -p or --strip option?
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|Index: mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/messenger.dtd
|===================================================================
|RCS file: /cvsroot/mozilla/mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/messenger.dtd,v
|retrieving revision 1.64
|diff -u -p -9 -r1.64 messenger.dtd
|--- mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/messenger.dtd  10 Jun 2007 20:20:48 -0000      1.64
|+++ mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/messenger.dtd  11 Jul 2007 19:41:00 -0000
--------------------------
File to patch: