There are still a few known bugs in slrn and a lot of suggestions for useful new features nobody took the time to implement yet. We try to collect them on this page, so they will not get lost until somebody fixes / implements them. If we already have a patch for a bug or if there is a working macro that implements a feature, it does not get listed here.
Please contact us if you have a great new idea (so we can add it) or if you want to help with a feature (so you can find out if somebody else is already working on it).

Bugs and misfeatures

If you find a bug or misfeature, please see the corresponding section in the slrn FAQ on what to do about it.

Features in article mode

Scoring by thread
Added 2000-08-21	not before 1.0
Score postings based on their parent articles in the thread (if possible, with a customizable recursion depth). This could be used to kill followups to articles by people who are notorious for posting flame-baits. Kaz Kylheku suggested introducing a prefix symbol to make slrn look up the parent article (e.g. the line @From: <known@troll\.com> would refer to the ``From:''-Line of the parent article).
Content scoring
Added 2000-08-03	macro candidate
Sometimes it would be helpful to score based on information from the article body. Since this requires fetching all bodies, it is an expensive operation and should probably only be executed on request. Content scoring would allow to put a score on articles with long signatures, too much quoted material or overly long lines. It should be possible to do this with a macro, but it has not yet been implemented.
Adaptive scoring
Added 2000-08-03	unscheduled
The newsreader Gnus can be configured to automatically add a (negative) score for the author and subject of every message that is marked as read without being fetched from the newsserver.
Support noffle's status header
Suggested 2000-11-27 by Mardy	unscheduled
Noffle is an NNTP cache used for reading news offline. It inserts a custom header (``X-Noffle-Status'') to indicate the current status of the message. slrn could (optionally) parse it and introduce a new header format descriptor that prints information about the article based on it.
Fetch new headers
Suggested 2001-04-24 by Johannes Zellner	planned for 0.9.8.x
You currently need to quit to group mode if you want to check for new postings on the server. It would be more convenient if slrn could also fetch new headers while in article mode.
Make scrolling configurable
Added 2001-08-21	unscheduled
Some people would like to configure the ``margin'' when scrolling (i.e. they want the display to scroll when the cursor is n lines away from the top / bottom). A similar wish is to configure the number of overlapping lines when scrolling a whole page up / down.
Search in different groups when reconstructing threads
Suggested 2001-07-22 by Nikolaus Rath	unscheduled
The function that reconstructs threads only looks for children in the current group. When some articles were cross-posted, we would come up with a more complete tree if those groups were also searched. Note: In some situations, such a function would cause excessive server load, so I'm not sure it's a good idea to implement it.
Allow collapsing of subthreads
Suggested 2001-08-25 by Sabine Baer	unscheduled
It would make navigation in large threads easier if it was possible to collapse certain subthreads. Currently, collapsing always affects the whole thread.
Use numerical tags in more situations
Added 2002-04-21	unscheduled
Currently, numerical tags are used in few situations (like saving articles). It would be nice if you could also followup to / reply to / forward / score etc. all tagged articles.
Allow definition of aliases
Suggested 2002-08-27 by Sven Guckes	unscheduled
It would be neat if slrn allowed you to use aliases for CCs and to implement a reverse_alias option like in mutt (i.e. for a given address, display the realname found in the alias file). It would be an extra plus if the alias file had the same format as the one used by mutt, so you could share it.
Limit visible headers
Added 2003-12-19	unscheduled
Sometimes, you do not want to see all available headers, but limit the view to those that match a given pattern. The mailreader mutt offers a ``limit'' command that does just this and it would be nice if slrn had a similar feature.

Pager features

More MIME features
Added 2000-08-03	not before 1.0
It would be useful if slrn supported MIME multipart / attachments. If it encounters a content-type it cannot display, it should use the mailcap file to either find an external viewer or a program that will decode the article to text/plain, so that it can be displayed in the internal pager. This would also help us to support HTML, vcards etc. A well-tested implementation of this exists in the mailreader mutt.
Special treatment of whitespace
Added 2000-08-03	planned for 0.9.8.x
If there is a lot of whitespace in an article, you may want to collapse multiple spaces to a single space and blocks of empty lines to a single line.
Color regexps in article body / header
Added 2000-08-03	probably not before 1.0
Nikolaus Filus asked for an extra color object for cited text (text indented by `|'). A more general approach to this would be to allow the definition of colors for matches of user-defined regular expressions, separately for headers and bodies. This would also allow to color search results, important header lines, smilies, numbers etc.
Handle different charsets better
Added 2001-08-21	planned for 0.9.9.x
The current handling of character sets that are different from the local one is, in many regards, insufficient. The best solution would be to translate everything into Unicode and then back to the local charset, but the required libraries are not available everywhere. The announced UTF-8 support for slang 2.0 will solve some of these problems, but we probably need a (provisonal) solution in slrn before that - like an interface to import custom charset translation tables at runtime.
Support format=flowed
Suggested 2004-08-05 by Martin Trautmann	unscheduled
slrn could support flowed text that can be wrapped according to preferences of the reader. This is specified in RFC 3676, but does not seem to be widely used on Usenet.

Features in group mode

Put related groups into folders
Suggested 2001-06-06 by Albert Koellner	probably not before 1.0
It would be nice if you could put newsgroups into folders, especially if you are subscribed to a lot of them. An additional plus would be to allow collapsing and nesting of these folders.
Show number of high scoring articles within group
Added 2004-03-03	not before 1.0
If the group overview already indicated how many high scoring articles a group contains, this would help the user to look at interesting groups (e.g. those that contain followups to own messages) first. Unfortunately, finding this information would be a very expensive operation unless header caching is used at the same time, so it probably will not be implemented before that feature is present.

Features for the line editor

Improved history function
Added 2000-08-03	planned for 0.9.8.x
On exit, slrn could save the history of the line editor to a file (like most modern shells do), so that entries do not get lost between sessions. Also, it would often be useful if different functions each had their own history (e.g. different histories for newsgroup names, search strings etc.).

Features at startup time

Allow continuation of lines in config files
Added 2001-09-20	planned for 0.9.8.x
Sometimes, lines in the config file become very long, which makes it hard to view and edit them. It would be nice if you could ``continue'' a command on the next line like in most shells (by putting a backslash at the end of the line).

Features in slrnpull

Find duplicates via history file
Suggested 1997-12-01 by Urko Lusa	not before 1.0
Using a news history file, slrnpull would not download the same article twice if your newsrc file gets lost or if you want to get messages from different servers.
Don't expire postings with a certain score
Suggested 2000-09-03 by Gary Jones	unscheduled
You might not want slrnpull to expire especially important articles, so it would be good to have a score threshold to prevent this.

Hooks and S-Lang features

Enhanced regular expressions in S-Lang
Added 2000-08-03	planned for slang 2.0
Currently, S-Lang only understands a subset of the operators you can use in programs like egrep or perl. Especially an OR-operator and grouping operators are missing. S-Lang 2.0 might link in an external regexp library, which would lift this restriction.
Add auto_post_filter_hook
Added 2002-01-20	planned for 0.9.8.x
Currently, you need to press "F" before an article is sent to the "post_filter_hook". We could add an "auto_post_filter_hook" in case the user wants to run a filter on every outgoing message.
Add hooks for "display formats"
Added 2001-08-30	unscheduled
To allow even more freely customized display formats (for the status lines, the group and the header window), it would be nice to insert strings generated by arbitrary slang functions there.

Miscellaneous features

Improved online help window
Added 2000-08-03	planned for 0.9.8.x
The help window should always show the current keybindings instead of displaying a fixed text. It should also be possible to scroll and to search in the help window (like in the pager). The mailreader mutt does this nicely. This feature would also allow a function that lists all keys which are still unbound.
Support mailboxes and virtual newsgroups
Added 2000-08-03	not before 1.0
Some people would like to do their email with slrn or read articles they saved to a file with slrn, so an mbox backend is requested from time to time. Olly Betts has a page on this topic. A similar request is to add ``virtual'' newsgroups that would contain articles that match certain rules (follow-ups to your own posts, FAQs etc.).
Server menu
Suggested 1997-08-08 by Gabriel Zachmann	unscheduled
If slrn cannot find a default newsserver or if the command-line option `-h' is given without an argument, slrn could display a menu of available servers (derived from all ``server'' commands in .slrnrc).
Decode to non-existent file
Suggested 2001-04-30 by Trond Are Undem	unscheduled
When decoding articles, change the filename if necessary to avoid overwriting existing files.
Check for new mail
Suggested 2001-05-23 by Michael Perry	unscheduled
Optionally display a note in the status line that states whether the user has new mail. Alternatively, we might implement the option to embed strings generated by an slang hook in the status line.
Cache headers (and maybe even bodies) locally
Added 2001-07-21	not before 1.0
It would save bandwidth if slrn could (optionally) cache headers locally so that it does not need to retreive them from the server again when the user reconstructs a thread. This wish could be extended to cache article bodies as well. Some of the code needed for this is already present in slrnpull.
Dynamically allocate memory in more places
Added 2001-08-21	planned for 0.9.9.x
In many places, slrn uses fixed length buffers where it really should allocate the needed memory dynamically. This often introduces unnecessary limitations - e.g., URL recognition is currently limited to 256 characters.
Compress files to save diskspace
Added 2001-08-30	probably not before 1.0
To save diskspace, slrn could optionally compress the files it is using (like the newsrc and newsgroup description files). An extension of this would be to make slrnpull compress messages it writes to the spool and have slrn decompress them for reading. This would be implemented using an external library (like zlib).