For those who do not yet know about them, KILLfiles are wonderful
things; they can drastically improve the signal-to-noise ratio of
netnews.  If you don't have a newsreader that supports KILLfiles,
see if you can get one.

Under trn, rn, and many other newsreaders, if you encounter an article
whose subject you no longer wish to see, simply press 'k' and all
matching articles will be juked.

If you *never* want to see a subject again, press 'K'.  This creates
the file $HOME/News/soc/women/KILL (name varies depending on newsgroup)
containing the line

	/<subject>/:j

which means "junk any articles with <subject> in the Subject: line.  E.g.:

	/OJ Simpson/:j


For more advanced usage, you can edit your KILLfile with ^K (control-K),
which brings your KILLfile up in your favorite editor.  You may now add
commands of your own design.  With a little finesse, you can junk not
only articles whose subject you're not interested in, but also articles
from specific people or sites.  (Every September I come very close to
junking all articles from sites with .edu in their name.)

The general form for a command in a KILLfile is:
	/<pattern>/[modifiers]:commands

where <pattern> is a pattern to be matched.  Most letters are matched
literally.  '.' matches any single character, 'x*' matches 0 or more
occurances of 'x', and '.*' matches anything at all,

<modifiers> are:

	f	search "From:" line instead of "Subject:" (trn only)
	h	search entire header instead of just subject line
	a	search entire article (slow!)

and <commands> are:

	j	junk article
	=	show subject line

There are other modifiers and commands (type 'h' while reading a newsgroup
to see them), but these are the most useful ones.

Here are a few examples from my own KILLfile:

Topics I'm sick of:

	/Abortion/:j
	/OJ Simpson/:j
	/Lets legalize rape !!!/:j
	/LIMBAUGH/:j
	/MAKE.MONEY.FAST/:j

net.misogynists I'm sick of:

	/Mr. Equality/f:=:j
	/Steve Chaney/f:=:j
	/Steven Grzesik/f:=:j
	/marko@access.mbnet.mb.ca/f:=:j
	/schafer@netcom.com/f:=:j
	/sheaffer@netcom.com/f:=:j
	/taite/f:=:j

anything crossposted to any abortion newsgroup is likely to be off-topic
and obnoxious:

	/Newsgroups:.*abortion/h:=:j

Anything from earthlink is likely to be spam:

	/Path:.*earthlink.net/h:=:j

Note the use of the ':=' command to show the subject lines as the
articles are deleted.  It helps me keep track of what's going on.

Remember:  KILLfiles, your key to quality netnews.