Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Mark Zacharias wrote:
I used to spend a lot of time perusing the likes of
sci.electronics.repair, rec.audio.tech, etc but anymore it seems just
about everyone has left the room for good, except the spammers of
course...

Just block g-mail to get rid of most of it. Those private individuals
silly enough to use it will soon get the message.

Any good electronics repair forums you guys like?

(those of you still around here that is...)


Well, I guess I'm blocked, too, so Dave probably won't see this, but
googlegroups can be dropped w/o dropping the whole of gmail. NewsProxy
and nfilter work quite well for doing exactly this. I've not been
seeing spam from gmail sources.

Gmail offers a nice set of features and perfect functionality with
T-bird -- compared to yahoo (blasted negative vibes AGAIN!), live.com,
etc. I don't think it's silly at all to use something that works so
well for free and lets the user keep his/her ISP email address private.

That being said, are a good alternative. Would it really be that
difficult for NG users to find one another after the move to forums? I
think not, so the question is why NOT leave the NG's to the spammers?


Advantages I see with forums a

1) user registration prior to posting! stop spammers before they
strike; if one bothers registering, moderator/admin deletes them
2) moderators (many can be assigned to handle heavy traffic)
3) easier searches (depends on app)
3) thread retention not dependent upon NG server
4) image hosting (as if there aren't enough photo album servers out there)
5) bios (for those so inclined)
6) private messaging system -- keeps email addresses private

I can think of only two advantages normal NG's have over today's forums:

1) reliability/availability -- if a forum site goes down, it's down for
everyone
2) access/availability in some parts of the world --though I'm not sure
that's as much of an issue as it once was.

I said "normal" above to distinguish text NG's from binaries, where
copyrighted and obscene material can be easily exchanged; a purpose
which can be defeated in a forum.