In article , Joe wrote:

Also, is there a way to kill just a part of a thread, based on, say,
who the poster is. eg, if hypothetical poster "numbnuts" tries to
hijack a thread, and some readers are suckers enough to engage him in
a ****ing contest, I would like to ban (or simply "ignore") just that
subthread, but not the rest of the thread.

This can be done in newsreaders (or proxies) that support filtering on the
References: header. Find the Message-ID: of the first post of the subthread
(the one by "numbnuts"), then filter anything that includes that value in the
References: header. I don't know if Agent does this or not. The Nfilter proxy
(also known as NewsProxy) will do this. http://www.nfilter.org

See my followup post to this one for example.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.