A nice and portable way to control which new newsgroups should be subscribed (or ignored) is to put an options line at the start of the .newsrc file. Here's an example:
options -n !alt.all !rec.all sci.all
This line obviously belongs to a serious-minded intellectual
scientific person (or she may just be plain old boring), because
it says that all groups that have names beginning with
‘alt’ and
‘rec’ should
be ignored, and all groups with names beginning with
‘sci’ should
be subscribed. Gnus will not use the normal subscription method
for subscribing these groups.
gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method is used
instead. This variable defaults to
gnus-subscribe-alphabetically.
If you don't want
to mess with your .newsrc
file, you can just set the two variables
gnus-options-subscribe and
gnus-options-not-subscribe. These two variables do
exactly the same as the .newsrc ‘options -n’ trick. Both are regexps,
and if the new group matches the former, it will be
unconditionally subscribed, and if it matches the latter, it will
be ignored.
Yet
another variable that meddles here is
gnus-auto-subscribed-groups. It works exactly like
gnus-options-subscribe, and is therefore really
superfluous, but I thought it would be nice to have two of these.
This variable is more meant for setting some ground rules, while
the other variable is used more for user fiddling. By default
this variable makes all new groups that come from mail back ends
(nnml, nnbabyl, nnfolder,
nnmbox, nnmh, nnimap, and
nnmaildir) subscribed. If you don't like that, just
set this variable to nil.
As
if that wasn't enough,
gnus-auto-subscribed-categories also allows you to
specify that new groups should be subcribed based on the category
their select methods belong to. The default is
‘(mail
post-mail)’, meaning that all new groups from
mail-like backends should be subscribed automatically.
New groups that match these variables are subscribed using
gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method.