"David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
.com...
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.

stuff snipped

Setting up a Usenet reader may seem trivial to the computer literate, but
it's not so easy for many others. Google groops has confused the issue
further by blurring the line between newsreader access and web-based access.

There are even commercializers like the Stucco suckers that offer access (I
always thought it pretty rude to snipe at a poster comi+ng from their since
it's pretty obvious they had no idea (nor should they, really) that Usenet
and all its conventions are out there and Stucco is piggybacking on Usenet
for ad purposes).

The poor poster just sees a form to enter info to perhaps get a question
asked after finding Stucco via a Google search. To whack on these poor
souls, or even someone who doesn't know the fine art of Googling, is the
mark of the net-nanny or the unhappy. Not sure which. Certainly not
sympathetic. To be hurled into the world of plonking, trolling, top and
bottom posting, snipping, cross-posting, Joe Jobbing and sock puppetry HAS
to be pretty damn confusing, especially when you want to find out how to get
a rust stain out of concrete.

So, I didn't answer your question, but I should. There are many groups,
usually where the traffic is low, where I read backwards from latest to
earliest. Why? So that I don't spend a lot of time answering a question
that's already been answered or waste my time being polite to someone who's
turned nasty.

Busy people who belong to a lot of groups might tend to read newest to
oldest in chrono order without any threading. Those are the people I think
most likely to take offense to high level of OT posts. There are ways to
filter on OT, and some newsreaders are better than others. If I were really
public-spirited, I would put together a FAQ about how to bypass OT messages
for each of the major newsreaders and in a thread v. unthreaded viewing
style. It's probably more a job for those who are so seriously offended by
OT posts that they have the motivation to spend the time on such a task.

--
Bobby G.