[OU] Delete feeds?

[James Card]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:20:54 -0700, Ledgem <amd.ledgem at gmail.com> wrote:

>> On 10/17/07, CJ <hwoodcj at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>> I've got 523 feeds, and I want to delete them all (because they
>>> immobilize Opera). Is there an easy way to do that? Maybe delete
>>> the file (what's its name)? I tried importing an empty .opml file
>>> and Opera just added that to what I already had (didn't substitute).
>
> I did a quick check and if he's dealing with actual feeds, there doesn't  
> seem to be a way to select multiple of those at once, and I'm pretty  
> sure that Opera prompts you before deleting the feed. Doing that  
> 500+ times would certainly take a while. The brute-force way to do this  
> would be to use some macro program to handle the select-delete-click  
> OK-select-delete etc. cycle - if you're on Mac OS there's the Automator.  
> If on Windows, the macro software I used was quite old and was called  
> Groone's Macroer. I don't know if it's available anymore... the learning  
> curve isn't terrible, I'd recommend playing with it for about 20 minutes  
> and letting it do a simple task a few times before setting it to the  
> task on Opera.
>
> While some newer macroers can recognize window titles and such, Groone's  
> worked by screen pixel coordinates. So if it deleted all of the feeds,  
> it's continue trying to follow the routine unless you either manually  
> stopped it or had specified a loop count. Think of Mickey and the brooms  
> from Fantasia - you don't want that to be you :)

If you took this approach I'd recommend AutoIt <URL:  
http://www.hiddensoft.com/AutoIt/ >.

An alternate method would be to edit Opera's configuration files to delete  
the feeds. This has the potential to break things so DON'T DO IT UNLESS  
YOU'VE MADE AT LEAST ONE GOOD BACKUP FIRST of everything in Opera's mail  
folder. Here's how you would do this:

1. Select "About Opera" from the Help menu. On the About page, find the  
"Mail directory" in the Paths section. Use your favorite tools and methods  
to make a back up copy of everything in that directory. This lets you put  
things back the way they were if bad things happen.

2. Set all your e-mail and newsgroup accounts to not automatically  
retrieve new messages from the server. Also close any chat windows that  
open and connect automatically when you start Opera. What we're trying to  
do is ensure that Opera does not write anything to the mail directory  
until we tell it to while we're testing the changes we made.

3. Close Opera, and don't restart it until we've finished our edits.

4. Make another backup of your mail directory -- just because we're  
paranoid. You can skip this step, but having too many backup is better  
than not being able to recover what you need.

5. Open the accounts.ini file that is in your mail directory using your  
favorite text editor.

5a. Notice the [Accounts] section at the top of the file; you will need to  
update the Count= line after you delete all the feeds you want to.

5b. Then find all the [AccountXX] (where "XX" is a number) sections that  
contain RSS feeds (search for "Incoming Protocol=RSS") and delete the  
entire section for each of the feeds you don't want. To be real tidy about  
it, you would also delete the corresponding AccountXX=XX line from the  
[Accounts] section at the top of the file.

5c. For each of the AccountXX sections that you delete there will be a  
corresponding subdirectory in your %Mail_directory%\store\ directory;  
delete that AccountXX subdirectory and everything in it.

5d. ...

Actually, the more I think about it I realize that this is likely to bring  
disaster. There will be indexing issues to resolve and it gets pretty  
complex in a hurry. Don't bother to save the edits you've made. Restart  
Opera and visit the AutoIt site. Undo the changes made in step 2 above.  
Restore any directories you deleted in step 5c. Keep the backup you made,  
you should have that anyway.

If you're a very brave (or foolish) person who's comfortable with backing  
up and restoring files, using a programmer's text editor, figuring things  
out, and solving problems that might arise -- it will probably be faster  
and easier to remove all those feeds by editing the config files. You'd  
also want to look at the index.ini file and do a search for instructions  
on how to force Opera to rebuild its indexes (the information is  
available).

Or you can find the most convenient 5th-grade child and pay them a nickel  
for each feed to sit at your keyboard and delete them all one-by-one.  :-)

-- 
James Card  --  http://jdcard.com/