I want to share some of the funny things I do with the search rules.
To follow this playing guide, you'll have to compile Phex for yourself (there's a
guide to that in our wiki).
First step: Creating funny rules.
Most of my rules are pretty straightforward, for example they hide all files with a size of "at least 197.7kB and at most 197.7kB", which means: All which are exactly 197.7kB in size (which is a standard-spam file, which I no longer wanted to see).
Another one hides all files smaller than 0byte, because I got spam with files having sizes below 0.
But those are the simple and useful ones. More fun (and certainly more risky) are ban and download rules.
Ban rules (only avaible in svn at the moment) have the big advantage, that scammers get banned automatically. But since Phex has to process a list of more that 8.000 ip adresses on each ban, auto-banning can very easily bring down your system, so use it with care.
Banning the hosts is more efficient than hiding or deleting results, because Phex doeesn't aknowledge any reply from a banned host, so it doesn't get counted in
Dynamic Querying and your searches travel far further, means, you get more results, if you manage to do it in a manner, which keeps your Phex running (I told you, it's a game
).
For example I sometimes activate a filter, which just bans hosts that serve known spam (text translated, as I use a german Phex):
"on getting search results
with 'buylegalmp3.com' oder 'efreeclub' oder '----------------' in the filename
ban source"
This does sometimes lead to Phex stopping to work (I assume it might come back after an hour or so, but I don't want to wit that long
), but if Phex survives that strain, I get far better results for some time (till the spammers changed their IP-Adresses).
And the second part of the game are download rules.
If I have a search, which will yield many results for songs I want, but I don't want to have to click all 300 of them by hand, I just activate a rule, which automatically downloads all music files, as long as they don't contain spam-names or "Preview-t" or "INCOMPLETE".
Since the spam-rule processes and weeds out bad files before the download-rule runs, I mostly get good files with this, and downloading new files is as smple as hitting "start search" again.
But if you do this, don't be mad if you get duplicate files, virus-ridden mp3s, files with strange names, things you didn't really search for, or similar. You have to weed out bad files by hand, before you put them into your playlist.
When you do this, you will really love the ability of Phex to manage a few tousand downloads
Many will not work, but as there might well be 5 versions of a song, you might not have to worry about that so much. Just remember to remove duplicates, before putting them into your player
.
But please remember: These are funny games. They won't empty your fridgerator and eat your cat, but they may well get virusses on your computer, eat your video-files or download scamware, because this is teh risk, if you don't check each download yourself.
But sometimes that's the price for careless playing. If you are willing to pay it, then good luck to you, if not, then take care and check automatic action-rules at least thrice, before using them
Have fun!