"David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
.com...
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 think there are at least a few people that check for new messages many,
many times during the day who don't read threadwise. I'd have to spend a
lot more time here and looking at postings to try to determine how many that
is.

I know when I am very busy, I filter out anything except replies to my own
posts. If I am bored, I just look at the newest posts every few hours or
so. AHR is a group where just skimming can give you very useful hints (like
spraying a hose on the roof when forced into the attic on a very hot day!).

I think AHR's got very healthy proportions of signal to noise, a level of
appropriate net-nannyism that only occasionally flairs and a whole host of
frustrated stand-up comedians that need to work a live room for a few years
to polish their acts. Net humor, especially to newbie posters generates far
more "WTF?" responses than it does laughs. A lot of netwars start over
someone's bad attempt at humor that gets very badly misinterpreted.

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.

Well, that's a sizzling bit of flamebait for Unix users. (-: Did anyone
bite? Fortunately, that Unix v. Windows dog hunts less and less than it
used to.

People clearly read the group in all sorts of ways. Some loosely agreed
upon conventions should be able to maximize the utility for everyone without
requiring inordinate sacrifices. I won't enage in OT threads that aren't
marked OT simply because I feel that's one small way of acknowledging that
people have a right to be able to read Home Repair messages and nothing else
when coming here. Since the reality is that OT threads break out everywhere
all the time, making it easy for someone to filter them or skip over them
seems reasonable. I realize they would just like them to stop completely,
but I've never seen it happen so a compromise looks like the only way out.

--
Bobby G.