Last Revised: 4/19/04
This guide is meant to get you up and running with Hamster, a proxy news server for your PC. I personally got Hamster as trolls decided to masquerade as other people in alt.certification.a-plus, and thus kill filtering them was very hard (without filtering the legitimate posters). A nice feature of Classic Hamster is being able to filter articles based on ANY header or text in the body! First things first. Grab a copy of Classic Hamster. Be sure to get beta version 1.3.23.150 or later. Extract Hamster anywhere you want. Hamster has no dependences on the Windows registry as I have ghosted Windows back over and Hamster still worked as before (Hamster being on a separate partition of course). Now to the setup...Go to Configuration > Accounts & Passwords and setup a local account for yourself (can be any login or password you want). You'll use this login and password later on to connect to Hamster.
Go to Configuration > News: server, groups, pulls, ... > News server and put in the information for your news server
Go to Configuration > News: server, groups, pulls, ... > News-Pulls and click Add. Where it says "Show groups which", put in a pattern for your favorite news groups. For example, enter in "a-plus" and it will return all the groups that contain that keyword. Now click on the group you want. It should show up in the bottom pane. Click on it again (in the lower pane) and hit ok.
Now you are subscribed to that news group. Time to setup your news reader. I'll take Xnews as an example since I use that:
Go to Special > Setup Xnews > Servers
Click New. Enter in 127.0.0.1 as the address. Input the login and password you made from the first step above.
Now load up Hamster. Go to Online>All Servers.
Now it will pull the new articles from the news groups you are subscribed to. If you go back to Xnews and use the LocalHost server (or whatever you called it) you'll see the groups you subscribed to. Viola!Now, the BEST part (and why I got Hamster!): THE KILL FILE!
Go to Configuration > Killfile-Log/Settings. Click on the Scorefile tab.
Here's an example of my kill file. Place a ? in front of the line if you are filtering on a non-standard header (standard headers include From:, Subject:, References:, Message-ID, etc)
If you want to filter on keywords in the body of the message try: ?-9999 Body: "jerk". In this example, we used the word "jerk", but it can be any phrase or word. Now, Hamster will only pull articles from the subscribed groups when you force it to. If you would like it to pull articles periodically (and on startup automatically) try this script:
#!load hamster.hsm
# purge before timer starts
HamPurge
HamWaitIdle
AtClear
AtAdd( mailnews, "00:00", "24:00", "1111111", 60, true )
AtExecute
sub mailnews
HamNewsPull ( "" )
#HamNewsPost ("news.newshosting.com","nntp")
#HamWaitIdle
HamFetchMail( "pop-server.wi.rr.com" , "pop3" , "aleinss" , "XXXXXXX")
HamNewsPost
HamWaitIdle
HamNewsJobsClear
HamSendMail( "smtp-server.wi.rr.com")
HamWaitIdle
endsub
quit
Go to Scripts>Manage Scripts and Modules
Click on the Scripts tab and then click New. Copy all of the blue text into the file and save the filename as periodic (changing the pop, news and stmp server to your settings of course). Clarification: You should comment HamFetchMail and HamSendMail out with a # in front of each if you do not want Hamster to deal with your e-mail.Now click Configuration>Automation. Click the Actions tab, then Hamster, then Startup and enter in period.hsc under the Run Script title. Now when Hamster loads it will pull articles from your subscribed news groups every hour!
To kill postings made by people that can't set their clocks right (or think this is the year 2020) try the rule: -9999 Age %<-2 # ignore all articles newer than 2 days from current datein the Scorefile (Age is a pseudo field given to every article by Hamster...you don't see it, but it is there).Only use Hamster for text groups, not binary groups as it will download all new articles it finds (the number of which can be limited by the user). Note that if you post through Hamster as your posting server (which may or may not be definable in your news reader...in Xnews you can define one server for pulling and X number of them to post; in Agent, your pulling/posting server is one in the same) your message will not post to the real news server right away. It will only post if you force it to (by manually keying CTRL-A) or waiting until the periodic script runs.