Thanks to both of you for the suggestions and tips. I only scanned
your messages just now and tomorrow will read them more carefully and
try some of the suggestions to see how things work for me. I've used
binsearch a little and had trouble finding things that I'm pretty sure
were there, so I have trouble trusting my use of it, so I look forward
to trying your tips. But I don't necessarily know what I'm looking
for, so that's why I get all the headers to see for myself. I never
expected to get a billion headers in one group!
Yes, I know I'm doing things the ridiculous hard way, but it's the
only way to guarantee I don't miss stuff. For example, one of things
I got today was National Lampoon's Lemmings, something I'd been
wanting to see for years. There was no NZB file with it. It would
never have occurred to me to search for that. I just found it while
drudging thru page after page of crap. I've got about 14 Gb of new
stuff so far, so I think it is worth the labor. You never know what
you might find.
I learned another Agent feature in the process. There was one poster,
"foreign" who only posted non-english stuff. I held the shift +
pagedown keys, and selected page after page after page for several
minutes. I finally stopped and deleted what I had so far. The scroll
bar didn't move a bit. I decided to add a kill filter for this
poster, just to see how many headers there were and how long it would
take to process. I clicked "Apply Filters" and went grocery shopping.
When I got back, it was not even half done. It took 2 hours, and it
deleted over 400,000 headers. I started with 8.8 million, and have it
down to 7.8 million, so I'm making progress... of course, I still need
to get the rest of that billion headers, so I'm likely to do the
"catch up" thing eventually, but I'm not ready to do that yet.
What I learned about Agent is that it doesn't know how to multitask at
all. The whole time it was processing the filter the downloading
froze and didn't resume until after all was done, which probably even
included the wait time for me to click "okay" to finally delete the
headers. So I lost two hours of download time, but it felt good to
see the header count drop so much. I could have never held
shift-pagedown for 8,889 pages! (400,000 headers / 45 headers per
page... Agent scrolls about 10 pages a second, so 15 minutes, i think
it would take... much faster than 2 hours, but golly, my fingers
would get numb and my eyes would fall asleep! ).
It has been my experience that a huge percentage, maybe half or even
more than half of the headers are garbage of one form or another, so
filtering out the first half goes pretty fast, but the bottom half
takes much longer when I actually have to page thru and decide what to
get and what to delete. Deleting will go faster in teevee, since I
mostly don't want any of what I'm finding. As long as I'm getting
plenty of content in the process, it is worth the bother.
I'm not downloading much of this recent stuff in the documentaries
group, whatever it is, nickname(?)'s stuff, so I rather enjoyed
exploring teevee's stuff.
Thanks for the tip NOT to use Agent to post. I have tried to post
with Agent a few years ago, and was not very successful. I have some
instructions from "Harley Hahn" that look pretty good. I'm still
thinking to try tweaknews for the posting server just to mix things
up.
as you know, different versions of Agent are different, especially
version 8. I had 8, but hated it, and am using 7.2.
|
|