reading the wreck on Google groups via internet explorer, I would sometimes come across a very long thread that stretches back years, and had been added to recently, after a gap of many years. Why, I wondered, does that happen? Well, now I know. I posted from AOL, and on AOL, my post appears with seven responses...but when I check the post on Google groups, it has been linked with a rail-and-stile thread from 1998...as I said, Fascinating!
to e-mail, remove 'nojunk' from e-mail address
The whole subject of USENET is pretty murky and is doubly so because so many administrators add their own little quirks and prejudices to how their servers respond. Some servers have an absolutely huge capacity and old messages are seldom deleted and somebody responding to an old message on one of these will find their message properly threaded. But when that server passes the post down the line the message may find itself on servers under different control which delete posts within days and there will be nothing to thread the reply to so you wind up with one of those "RE: FUBAR" messages floating on its own. Overall USENET is one of the miracles of the INTERNET. A miracle that it works at all...
snipped-for-privacy@aol.comnojunk (Eric G.) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m12.aol.com:
Because Google, who are brilliant when it comes to the web, are astoundingly clueless about Usenet. For some braindead reason they decided that all posts with the same subject line are part of the same thread (modulo the addition of "re:"). Thus they'll quite happily glom together totally unconnected threads which might be seperated by years.
By the same token, if the subject line in a thread changes for any reason, Google will happily start a new thread, with no way to connect back to the original thread & see how the conversation started.
John
I unfortunately must use google for reading rec.ww. I check it out while I'm at work and the corporate firewall blocks all but port 80. All of the other web-based newsreaders I've seen require subscriptions for posting, while google is free.
The biggest problem I have is with google's postings. 3-8 hour delay, so it sometimes seems like I'm not paying attention with my replies :)
Jay
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