On 7/4/2010 11:40 PM Robert Green spake thus:

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.

On this matter I agree entirely with you. While I hate the "Sucko
Company" model of Usenet-scraping and republishing, I don't think the
poor suckers who actually use their "service" should be come down on
like a ton of bricks, for the reasons you so well described.

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.

So just to be clear, you're saying you think there are significant
numbers of people who read newsgroups in an unthreaded fashion?

I guess my only question here would be "Why?". For the life of me I
cannot see any sense to that way of reading Usenet messages, especially
since virtually all methods of reading it let one easily view groups in
threaded order. I mean, there are probably some Unix geeks out there
still using some primitive program that doesn't allow this, but they can
be just ignored as noise.


--
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)