Quis custodiet ipsos custodes...

[Who shall guard the guards...]

OR...

How do I know if a nocem notice issuer is living up to his/her criteria? After all, those notices are a lot of gobbldygook- for all I know they are censoring certain points of view that they don't like.


For this example, I assume that you have installed nocem in the default location ~/.ncm -- if you haven't please make the necessary substitutions below.
  1. Use your newsreader to select the notices you wish to examine. Save as many as you wish into a file, in this example we'll call it "foo".
  2. If you wish to see what messages these notices would remove, that you normally would have seen, type "cat foo | ~/.ncm/spotcheck"

    If you wish to see what messages these notices would remove from all of the newsgroups in your newsrc (subscribed or unsubscribed) type: "cat foo | ~/.ncm/spotcheck -all"

  3. This will create a file called "~/.ncm/mbox-spotcheck". If you wish to use a different filename such as "~/bar", then you would append (-outfile="~/bar") to the above examples. (If you do this, then make the approprate substituions in the following examples.)
  4. Take a deep breath, and prepare yourself for much gelatinous pinkness.
  5. You can now examine that file with the pager or mailer of your choice. "more ~/.ncm/mbox-spotcheck" will work, but personally I like "elm -f ~/.ncm/mbox-spotcheck".

    I find it very helpful to view this sorted by the subject or the sender. From the menu screen in elm, type "o" to get the Options Editor. Then type "s" to select the sorting criteria. Press the spacebar until you see the option you like-- I recommend "Message Sender" or "Message Subject".

  6. Now you can thank heavens that with nocem you didn't have to see all of that, unless you wanted to.
    Email: moose@cm.org