On 6/30/2010 4:39 AM Robert Green spake thus:

From what I can gather, there's a great variation in the newsreaders people
use and how they use them. I would guess that some of the more prolific
posters read every new post as it comes in, without grouping messages by
threads. Others read entire threads or mark them as read if they don't like
them. It's a bitch to read chronologically and trip over dozens of
unrelated messages.

Well, now we're getting somewhere here. Let's talk a bit more about how
people read this newsgroup.

I guess I had sorta assumed that my way of reading was more or less
typical, but maybe it isn't. So let me describe it briefly. I use a
modren newsreader (Thunderbird), neither the best or the worst but
certainly adequate, and very much state-of-the-art.

Which means that because I have the newsgroup displayed in threaded
message format, I can easily hop, skip and jump around the messages and
read those I'm interested in pretty much at random. I'm not forced to go
through a thread sequentially; I don't use keyboard commands, but simply
click on those messages I want to read to display them in the message
pane. This is why, basically, I don't see what the big fuss is with
filtering messages and deciding which ones to read and which to ignore.
It's trivially easy for me to do my own filtering in real time with very
little brainpower required for the task.

So is this or is this not a typical way of reading newsgroups? I can see
how some methods of reading NGs would be horrendous. Reminds me of
someone I met who subscribed to a local neighborhood Yahoo! group I also
occasionally browse who said she didn't like reading it. After asking
her for more details, it turned out that she was subscribed to the
mailing list by email! That has to be the most horrendously painful way
to read any kind of group, as you're forced to wade through all that
crap in your inbox and either read or delete messages. Do people still
actually read Usenet that way? That to me seems as primitive as using
smoke signals.

I told her about the modren web-based interface for the group and
suggested she try this newfangled way of reading messages. (But in the
case of Usenet, I would never suggest using the Web way, like Google
Groups. Use a decent news client as [insert name of deity here] intended.)


--
The fashion in killing has an insouciant, flirty style this spring,
with the flaunting of well-defined muscle, wrapped in flags.

- Comment from an article on Antiwar.com (http://antiwar.com)