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.
The “options -n” format is very simplistic. The syntax above is all that is supports: you can force-subscribe hierarchies, or you can deny hierarchies, and that’s it.
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 subscribed 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.