score files

Files used by gnus to keep track of authors and subjects that the user is interested in. Gnus watches what you read and don't read and tries to present the articles that it thinks you will like more first. Score files are an alternative kill files.

When you configure gnus to score up the articles you read and score down those you kill, that is known as adaptive scoring. You can also score articles up or down yourself, by author, subject, or indeed any header (I score down anything that is cross-posted to too many newsgroups). And you can have gnus kill any article with less than a certain score.

One feature that would be very useful if it worked properly is that entries in your scorefile can be temporary and expire automatically after a certain time. So you can effectively killfile an annoying poster for a week and then see if they've become less annoying.

But what actually seems to happen is that the date of the entry is refreshed whenever a new article from the poster appears. So unless they take a week's break from posting, they'll stay in your killfile indefinitely.