Google Changed

[Chuckie]

Google Groups changed over night I don't know if I like it yet; what does eveyone else think? Chuckie

[mleblanca]

Yes, surprise, surprise! The "profile" thing will of course, only be of interest if people decide to provide their information. Will it be correct info--who knows??? I can't see any reason for rating a post with stars....... Will just have to wait and see

Emilie

[Chuckie]

It looks sort of like yahoo groups

[Travis M.]

I prefer my newsgroups via usenet.

[Claire Petersky]

Or rather, I prefer my newsgroups via a newsreader. Every time I've been stuck with google groups, it has gotten tiresome fast.

[Chuckie]

What do you mean by a newsreader?

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

A program that connects to a news server and presents the posts for every group that you select. I'm using Thunderbird (part of the Mozilla suite - look for it on mozilla.org.) There are others, such a Forte. Google on "news reader software", and you will find a large number of programs. All provide some means of setting filters to block posts that you don't want.

ISPs differ in the number of newsgroups they carry, since providing the service requires lots of disk space. A good ISP will carry roughly

20,000 newsgroups.

[Claire Petersky]

If you have a Windows machine, you probably got Outlook Express for free, which has a newsreader. Many people dis OE, but I suspect a lot of it is because it is a Microsoft product. OE works just fine. Your ISP will probably have a webpage on how to set up your newsreader. OE is used by many, so they'll show how to configure it for your service, along with Thunderbird and other common newsreaders.

My ISP is Earthlink, and they carry any newsgroup I'd care to read. If your ISP doesn't provide newsgroups (I wouldn't pay for one that didn't, but I use Usenet daily), then you can pay individual.de (see:

10 euros/year for the service, which is a pretty darn good deal.

[Starlord]

I don't use googlegroups, but I do use and even run some yahoogroups and ones on other list servers and there's a lot that gets posted that you'd never find on a newsgroup. They both have their own place in the online world.

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

Yes, OE and IE do work well, but if you use any MS 'net software, you should learn about how to improve security: do not rely on MS's anti-virus or anti-spyware products, they are _not_ good enough. A healthy dose of paranoia doesn't hurt either! :-)

And Windows and MS software aren't "free", they're just included in the price of the machine. Your computer would cost about $100 to $150 less without any operating system on it.

Useful info, thanks.