Why I’ve dumped Opera as newsreader…

Given my usual high praise for all things Opera, I feel that I owe it to myself to be upfront when things go wrong.

I've been using Opera for mail, newsfeeds and newsgroups for some time now and not had too many problems. But one thing has continually bugged me and that's the lack of maintenance automation in Opera, especially for clearing out/purging newsgroups. These can take up large amounts of disk space if you're not careful (especially binary groups). I'd already switched over to Agent for binaries, and recently upgraded that to Agent v3 (which – finally – allows multiple servers). I'd persisted with Opera for the rest and every few weeks would go through the palaver of setting each group to 'flat' rather than 'threaded' and then manually deleting x000 posts. Why oh why can't this be automated (or at least have a "delete all posts prior to…" option).

Well yesterday I went through the manual routine and deleted about 20000 messages. I then decided to re-index the database (by deleting the 'lexicon' folder). Somewhere at around 79000 messages Opera grabbed 100% of the CPU – and wouldn't give it up. After several aborted attempts it seemed ok, but then I noticed a slow down and Opera was redownloading several thousand messages. Aaargh! That was it. The only choice left to me was to delete the newsgroups completely so that I could at least re-index my mail/feeds properly. That worked (and reduced disk space usage from over 100MB to around 20MB).

I've now got all my groups on Agent which in the latest version uses a system of 'desks' to group the various newsgroups according to taste. What I dearly miss though is the Opera filtering system. I'd previously had Opera set up to filter on key words within messages so that anything relating to the Tungsten C pda would be filtered out (saving me having to read umpteen irrelevant posts). I'm going to miss that.

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. zenya

    19 Aug 2005

    HI Words,

    I just wanted to say thank you for a great photo gallery of your foxes.

    You are blessed to have this creatures near you and trusting you .

    Thanks again,

    Eve

  2. Words

    19 Aug 2005

    You're very welcome. 🙂

    They are just so great to have around, and so wonderfully friendly. I'm really enjoying seeing them (but you can probably tell that!)

  3. zenya

    19 Aug 2005

    yes I can tell, just be careful they sometimes have rabies.

  4. Words

    19 Aug 2005

    I'm always careful, but rabies is – fortunately – not yet a problem in England. We have a few cases with bats, but it's a different strain and doesn't transmit easily to humans (or foxes).

  5. zenya

    19 Aug 2005

    Happy to hear that you don't have a problem with rabies like we do here in USA.

    Now we have bear problems in Connecticut, my sister saw one in the woods just today and it wasn't in the woods like WOODs just out back behind a ladys house.

    🙁

    Eve

  6. Words

    19 Aug 2005

    Woah! Not sure if I would fancy bears being quite so close… Mind you, it'll probably keep the foxes away 😉

Comments are closed.

Close Menu