From: Richard Maine on
Beliavsky <beliavsky(a)aol.com> wrote:

> At the Google group Terence mentioned...

In addition to all the usual problems of google groups, that group has
the extra "feature" of being impossible to find. Try searching for it in
google groups using some obscure keyword like.... oh.... fortran. No
joy. You have to search with the underscore in order to find it. So one
has to be "in the know" in order to have any chance of finding it.
That's not going to be very effective as a place for people to go for
help.

I wouldn't be using it anyway, but that's either a pretty egregious
problem or someone has a very different viewpoint than mine of what such
a newsgroup would be for. Insert here the obvious comments about looking
at a software user's viewpoint in doing interface design.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
From: p.kinsler on
Tim Prince <TimothyPrince(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have no idea how Google could get any advantage by tactics tending
> toward killing public news groups.

Since they cannot Tmake money by serving ads inside newsgroup posts,
so they'd rather usenet groups died and were replaced by web formats?



ObFortran: ... nope, can't think of one.

#Paul
From: Craig Powers on
p.kinsler(a)ic.ac.uk wrote:
> Tim Prince <TimothyPrince(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> I have no idea how Google could get any advantage by tactics tending
>> toward killing public news groups.
>
> Since they cannot Tmake money by serving ads inside newsgroup posts,

I don't see how that follows. What's stopping google from serving ads
inside newsgroup posts?

They obviously can't do it on messages that don't originate or get
viewed on the google reader, but messages being viewed on the google
reader are the whole point here.

From: Charles on

> Gordon Sande wrote:

> My primary "regular" ISP finally stopped news feeds entirely.

Mine too, both the one at home and the one at our summer cabin.

> I followed the advice given here and subscribed to one of the excellent> news group specialists.

But since I retired, a paid service is not worthwhile. So I use
google, but not very often, and ignore threads that don't have several
replies. I suspect that paid services will not attract students or
casual users.

I would be delighted if everyone switched to a moderated group, but
that does not seem to be happening.

From: dpb on
Charles wrote:
....

> But since I retired, a paid service is not worthwhile. So I use
> google, ...

There are quite a few free servers

news.aioe.org
news.eternal-september.org

being two. Both have a fairly decent amount of spam filtering

> I would be delighted if everyone switched to a moderated group, but
> that does not seem to be happening.

They have their problems, too...first and foremost the willingness of
somebody suitable to serve as moderator.

W/ the above groups' filtering and a few judicious ones in the reader, I
see little to complain of, truthfully.

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