most newsreaders provide some means of scoring or filtering articles
in newsgroups by analyzing message header fields, e.g. from, subject, message-id, references, injection-info, xpost, path, etc., and where
text strings are found matching that newsreader's user-defined rules,
scoring and actions are applied; 40tude dialog's help "scoring rules":

40tude Dialog > Help[F1] > Index > Scoring Rules > Scoring/Actions Syntax >Scoring and actions is one of Dialog's most powerful features. The syntax

and actually most of the code is from Jurgen Haible's excellent local mail- >and newsserver Hamster.
What is Scoring?
Scoring is the process of assigning a number between -9999 and +9999 to a >message by applying scoring rules to the message. A scoring rule usually >analyzes one header field of the message and if it this header field matches >a certain text, a score value is assigned. For example, you can create a >scoring rule that assign the highest score value +9999 to all messages that >have your email address in the From header field, so that your messages >always receive a score of +9999.
The score value is shown in the header list in green for positive scores
and in red for negative scores:
Note that the list of headers can be sorted by score (with or without >threading), so scoring can be used to visually organize and separate >important from unimportant messages.
...
Usenet articles are scored twice in Dialog. When you get headers in a
group the scoring rules are applied to the available, limited number of >headers, however when you retrieve the complete body of the message, the >message is scored again and this time all headers can be scored.
The scoring and action rules are stored together in one file, the score
file, which you can access by selecting Settings, Scoring and actions
from Dialog's main menu.

[end quoted excerpt]

e.g., to demote cross-posted articles & darken subject header display:

[*]
=-1111 Xpost %>1
!setcolor(navy;maroon) Xpost %>1
=-2222 Xpost %>2
!setcolor(olive;gray) Xpost %>2
=-3333 Xpost %>3
!setcolor(gray;olive) Xpost %>3

also, to demote "noisy" news servers in specific newsgroups:

[news.software.readers]
=-4444 Message-ID server01 server02 server03 . . .
=-4455 References server01 server02 server03 . . .
=-4466 Header {^(Injection-Info:)} server04 server05 server06 . . .
=-4477 Header {^(NNTP-Posting-Host:)} server07 server08 server09 . . .
=-4488 Header {^(Path:)} server10 server11 server12 . . .

ignore flags can be set to help reduce "noise" in specific newsgroups
or heirarchies being plagued by troll farm "regulars", spammers, etc.:

[news.software.*]
!ignore,markread Message-ID server01 server02 server03 . . .

additional scoring rules may be desirable in some cases (e.g. scoring
from, subject, or other header fields), but simply ignoring articles/
threads by pressing the "i" key probably works better for most users
and will keep the "filters.dat" file compact and simple; it's easy to
test expressions using 40tude Dialog > Settings > Scoring and actions

40tude Dialog v2.0.15.1 (2005-2-7): https://www.barghahn-online.de/4td_faq/download.php https://www.barghahn-online.de/4td_faq/download/4d2b38.exe

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