Spalted Walt wrote in
:

John McCoy wrote:

John

(who wishes Google wouldn't link together totally unrelated
ancient threads.)

That's how threaded Usenet discussions work.

No, it's not how Usenet works.

Usenet has a header called "References" which is used to
thread discussions. That header exists specifically because
you can have multiple threads with the same subject.
Unfortunately, the folks at Google are ignorant of that header
(or purposefully chose not to use it, which is worse)(*), so
they mash together all threads with the same subject line.

In this case Google has joined basshammer's current thread
to some ancient thread with the same title, and confused
Dr Deb as to which posts are current and which are not.

John

(* I'm convinced Google uses Groups as a dumping ground for
folks they don't want to fire, but are too incompetent to
work on anything Google's really interested in).