in need of some help...

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Chris “Kwpolska” Warrick <kwpolska at gmail.com> wrote:
> (slightly offtopic, sorry.)

> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 12:20 AM, Jens Thoms Toerring <jt at toerring.de> wrote:
> > PS: If I may ask you a favor: consider refraining from using Google's
> >     completely broken interface to newsgroups - your post consists
> >     of nearly 200 lines of text containing all I wrote, with an empty
> >     line inserted between each of them, and a single line of text
> >     you wrote. It's rather annoying to have to sieve through that
> >     much of unrelated stuff just to find thar one line that's re-
> >     levant.

> Gmail automatically hides long quotes.  This is helpful in situations
> like this one.  More mail software should implement that
> functionality.  Seriously: once you go Gmail, you never go back.

i giess you mean Gougle groups and not Gmail, which I can't comment
on since I don't use it.

You still have to "un-hide" the message when you want to under-
stand what the other person is respoding to. And then you're back
to square one (and the double-spacing issue seems to remain). That
is why it has been a good tradition to remove everything when
you reply that isn't relevant to what you're replying to. Of
course, with the sorry excuse for an editor you habe in a web
based form that's more difficult to do than with a real editor.
That's one of the reasons I would advice to use a specialized
program that can be made to use the editor of your choice.

Another extremly annoying thing when reading via Google groups is
that there's no reasonable threading, i.e. it's not immediately
obvious what is meant as a reply to a specific post. That makes
Google groups basically useless for longer discussions.

And then Google groups overflow with spam messages that any
self-respecting news server would discard, so you never get
to see them.

> >             And this Google groups crap seems to make it nearly
> >     impossible to do it any other way. If you don't believe me see
> >     e.g.
> >
> >       http://wiki.python.org/moin/GoogleGroupsPython
> >
> >     There are much better alternatives to "Google groups",
> >     using a real usenet news server and a program that does
> >     not mess up content of news group postings. They've been
> >     developed with 30 years of experience with newsgroups.

> Or something even better: a mailing list.
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list is where you can
> find it.  Much friendlier than Usenet, and the software itself is
> developed by the FLUFL.

Mailing lists are quite fine and I'm on quite a number of them.
But I don't want many more to further fill up my inbox. And there
you again have the problem that there's no reasonable threading
of messages when these messages arrive in your mail folder.

> >     If I'd be conspiracy theorist I would conclude that Google
> >     is up to something bad in trying to make using newsgroups
> >     nearly impossible by their badly broken stuff (and, to add
> >     credibility to such a claim, their complete disregard for
> >     all the criticism they got over the years, actually making
> >     each version of Google groups even worse), but it's rather
> >     likely just another case of pure incompetence (or a "why
> >     should we care" attitude:-(

> They shouldn’t care because Usenet users often yell “Get off my
> lawn!”.  Young people don’t use newsgroups.  They don’t even know what
> Usenet is.

Well, it's a pity when younger people don't use newsgroups (no
idea if this is true, though) since they can be extremely useful
for all kinds of purposes - I e.g. learned a huge amount from
just lurking. And while some groups may be nicer than others,
that's no excuse for Google at all to actively trying to destroy
them. I'd rather prefer Google to simply get rid of Google groups
and put the long time archives they obtained from DajaNews into
better hands that do care.
                               Regards, Jens
-- 
  \   Jens Thoms Toerring  ___      jt at toerring.de
   \__________________________      http://toerring.de