hr(bob) wrote:
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.


Andy comments
I had the same trouble --- I was using Google Groups, which I
really like.

However, I suspected problems, so I installed Thunderbird and
eternal-september, a free news source. It took a while as I was
unfamiliar with it, but several hours and two six-packs later, I
have it up and running, and working well...

For email I had used Juno and Hotmail, two free web based
services. However , I am on dialup, and it seems to take forever
to load their home pages and see what came in....
Thunderbird can access both of them using pop , and checking
my messages on either only takes a couple seconds.... I still use
Juno for the ISP --- I just won't use their Email as much....

Now, Google has some cool features I particularly like, and
Juno Email has some really nice features also, so I will use them
when I have a puter that doesn't have Thunderbird set up on it....

This is probly old hat to many posters here, but I am so
proud of myself for getting all this to work together that I
wanted to let you know that it isn't all that hard.... after all,
"I" did it .... :))))

Andy in Eureka, Texas

I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

On 8/8/2011 3:48 PM, hr(bob) wrote:
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

If you are using Google to read, that may be the problem. I use it on
business computer and often don't see recent messages whereas
eternal-september is up to date.

"hr(bob) " wrote in message
...
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.


I presume you're using Google Groups for access? I've seen the same thing.
This has happened a couple times now in the last month. This is the longest
period it has continued though. They are coming out with a new version of
GG and maybe they screwed it up. If you go Google for GG help you can find
an email address to report problems to. I did that the last couple times.
This time I just resorted to using Outlook.

PS: I'm sure you'll be hearing from the GG bashers who think everyone should
use some other means to access newsgroups. I happen to like GG and up until
recently,
it's updated very quickly and worked well.

On 8/8/2011 2:48 PM, hr(bob) wrote:
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

It's the fault of Google Groups, which you have been using to access
and read Usenet newsgroups. Google's service has been spotty over the
past several weeks. If you Google Groups users want consistent access
to Usenet newsgroups, dump Google Groups, subscribe to an actual
Usenet news server, and configure a newsreader client to subscribe to
and read the Usenet newsgroups of your choice.

A couple of popular free news servers are aioe.org and
eternal-september.org. You can configure Thunderbird or Outlook
Express as newsreaders to read and post to alt.home.repair and other
Usenet newsgroups. It's really not too complicated to do, and once
you've got it set up, you will no longer be victim to Google's whims.

For instructions on how to subscribe and configure a news reader, visit

http://www.aioe.org/index.php?quickstart-guide

or

http://www.eternal-september.org/

On 8/8/2011 3:48 PM, hr(bob) wrote:
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

OK, here's one from last week. Coming home from work there were about
six state and local police cars around the corner from my house. They
were apprehending a couple of guys gutting the copper from an abandoned
house.

http://www.lohud.com/article/2011080...urglary-Somers

"." wrote in message ...

PS: I'm sure you'll be hearing from the GG bashers who think everyone
should use some other means to access newsgroups. I happen to like GG and
up until recently,
it's updated very quickly and worked well.

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google Groups going
back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy system.

On Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:17:45 -0400, RBM wrote:

On 8/8/2011 3:48 PM, hr(bob) wrote:
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

OK, here's one from last week. Coming home from work there were about
six state and local police cars around the corner from my house. They
were apprehending a couple of guys gutting the copper from an abandoned
house.

http://www.lohud.com/article/2011080...urglary-Somers

Some guys are cutting into gas lines and water meters.

"...Less than a month ago, thieves ripped them off the exact same
way."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44010914/ns/local_news-fort_myers_fl/

On Mon, 8 Aug 2011 14:18:00 -0700, "DGDevin"
wrote:

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google Groups going
back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy system.

Just wait until they launch Version 2.0

"A. Baum" wrote:

That's because G00gle Groups is not Usenet. Get a real Usenet
account, plenty of free servers that carry AHR if you can't
afford 6 bucks a month.

Absolutely no reason to spend money to read and post to usenet.

Use any usenet client you like (many are also e-mail clients) and any
one of many free NNTP servers.

Other than for binary file downloading, I dare anyone here to make a
cogent and logical argument why the use of a paid usenet account gets
you more than using a free server when it comes to reading and posting
to text groups.

There's no need to raise the bar or the price of admission for these
poor *******s that use google groups by telling them their best
alternative is to use a paid usenet server.

But I agree that google-groups is and always has been a ****-poor way to
experience usenet. It's a shame that it's the only entry or portal into
usenet that many people know about.

This might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders

I use Netscape Communicator 4.79 for reading news. It can be downloaded
from he

http://downloads.5star-network.com/I...t/cc32d478.exe

Here's what the user-interface looks like:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/7/.../navigator.gif

Very fast and efficient and organized way to read and post to usenet.

A huge advantage of using a usenet client running on your own computer
is that a copy of every post you make is stored locally on your own
system - exactly the same way that copies of e-mail you send are stored
locally in a "sent" folder. When you want to search for something you
posted in the past, it's much faster to search your own local sent
folder than to use Google's incredibly broken usenet search interface to
search their usenet archive.

"hr(bob) " wrote in message
...
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

Using Google Groups? I heard they are not using the posting on USENET any
more. If that is true, get a real newsreader and sign up with a news
service such as Giganews or eternal-september.

On Mon, 8 Aug 2011 21:50:12 -0400, "Ed Pawlowski"
wrote:


"hr(bob) " wrote in message
...
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

Using Google Groups? I heard they are not using the posting on USENET any
more. If that is true, get a real newsreader and sign up with a news
service such as Giganews or eternal-september.

Microsoft did the same thing in recent years. They pulled all the
"official" MS groups back too their server farm.

No more official "public" MS newsgroups.

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/

On 8/8/2011 9:50 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

"hr(bob) " wrote in message
...
I haven't seen any new postings since Aug 1 on stealing copper piping/
wiring. I checked on a friend's computer with a different login and
id and they are having the same problem.

Using Google Groups? I heard they are not using the posting on USENET
any more. If that is true, get a real newsreader and sign up with a news
service such as Giganews or eternal-september.

If you drill down on GG to any of your regular groups, it still has the
'this is a Usenet group' disclaimer, but no posts from last 7 days. A
fast pass around the various screens touting the 'new' GG, looks like
they are trying to recreate the Yahoo Groups experience, so who knows if
they will still portal to the real Usenet, or become another walled garden.

--

Oren wrote:

Microsoft did the same thing in recent years. They pulled all
the "official" MS groups back too their server farm.

No they didn't.

They basically turned off their usenet server - period.

No more official "public" MS newsgroups.

There was never anything "official" about the microsoft.public
hierarchy. Many people believed that Microsoft's servers was somehow in
control of that set of groups, but that implied an incorrect belief in
how usenet works.

Microsoft simply turned off their NNTP server. No action was required
by the rest of the "world-wide" network of usenet servers for those
groups to continue to exist - and thus they still do.

On 8/8/2011 2:18 PM, DGDevin wrote:

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google Groups
going back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy system.

The archives it provides of Usenet are extremely useful, but it's not
the greatest system for posting to Usenet because there is so much spam
originating from the Google Groups Usenet interface many people
automatically filter out all posts originating from Google Groups.

Probably Google Groups is not a big generator of ad revenue so they
don't put much effort into minimizing downtime. I've never seen it down
for this long in the past, so maybe they are dropping it completely.

SMS wrote:

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google
Groups going back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy
system.

The archives it provides of Usenet are extremely useful,

That was probably true in the past (5+ years ago) but for a long time
now the use of the search interface to find articles based on one
criteria or another is very broken.

http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&

Searching for words, phrases or even an exactly quoted subject line
results in a lot of false-negative and spurious results.

Entering in a specific group-name on the newsgroup line will frequently
return a list of results from other groups.

And even when you select the "google-groups" radio button (intended
presumably to give usenet-only results), you'll usually end up getting a
mix of usenet and google-group results.

And when you look at the Google "groups" search page:

http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&

Look at how many search fields are labelled or intended as if you were
searching for web-content.

but it's not the greatest system for posting to Usenet because
there is so much spam originating from the Google Groups Usenet
interface many people automatically filter out all posts
originating from Google Groups.

Yes, many people make it a point to kill-file any posts originating from
google.

But beyond that, unless things have changed, google has no automatic
spam-detection and deletion mechanism, which means that when-ever there
was a sporge flood in any given group, google faithfully showed you each
and every one of those posts. Not something that's particularly
ergonomic for anyone who uses google-groups as their primary usenet
interface.

Many other "real" NNTP servers are running noceum and cleanfeed to
****-can ad-spam and sporge.

Probably Google Groups is not a big generator of ad revenue so
they don't put much effort into minimizing downtime. I've never
seen it down for this long in the past, so maybe they are
dropping it completely.

I think what we can conclude from google's adventure into usent is this:

1) Google bought Deja's usenet operation so they'd have a ready-made
database of searchable content to add to their general-purpose
web-search capability.

2) Google, being run by a bunch of socially-inept engineers, thought
that google-groups would be their answer to the emerging opportunity of
social networking on the web. Along came classmates, facebook, myspace,
(etc) and the engineers didn't get it (they missed the boat).

3) Google has probably realized for several years that usenet is a
mine-field of illegality, copyright infringement, hate speech, and
general nastiness that's uncontrollable and un-censorable. Many ISP's
took down their NNTP servers several years ago for this very reason.
Google is probably thinking that instead of the negative optics of
dropping usenet entirely, they'll just let it suffer a death of a
thousand bad lines of google-groups API code.

I've made the case before in other newsgroups that I really don't see
how google can or has been leveraging usenet for financial gain. We all
know how they do that with other products, like gmail or the web-search
interface. With gmail, google's servers read your e-mail and try to
come up with applicable or relavent advertizing to show you on the
right-hand side of the screen as you read your mail.

On 8/9/2011 7:32 AM, Home Guy wrote:
SMS wrote:

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google
Groups going back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy
system.

The archives it provides of Usenet are extremely useful,

That was probably true in the past (5+ years ago) but for a long time
now the use of the search interface to find articles based on one
criteria or another is very broken.

http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&

Searching for words, phrases or even an exactly quoted subject line
results in a lot of false-negative and spurious results.

Entering in a specific group-name on the newsgroup line will frequently
return a list of results from other groups.

And even when you select the "google-groups" radio button (intended
presumably to give usenet-only results), you'll usually end up getting a
mix of usenet and google-group results.

Yes, all true. They've really worsened it since taking over from Dejanews.

I suspect that Google Groups is the poor stepchild at Google so they
don't assign their most experienced personnel to it, resulting in the
mess that it's become.

I've made the case before in other newsgroups that I really don't see
how google can or has been leveraging usenet for financial gain. We all
know how they do that with other products, like gmail or the web-search
interface. With gmail, google's servers read your e-mail and try to
come up with applicable or relavent advertizing to show you on the
right-hand side of the screen as you read your mail.

They try to put up appropriate sponsored links in Google Groups, but
they do a poor job of it.

Amusing video about Gmail at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXZOQAbatTE

"Oren" wrote in message ...

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google Groups
going
back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy system.

Just wait until they launch Version 2.0

I've been happily reading Usenet since the mid 90s, so the old expression
don't fix it if it ain't broke comes to mind. Why would I want to wait for
a new version of something that in my observation has always been a pain in
the ass when the original Usenet is still working just fine after all these
years?

"Home Guy" wrote in message ...

But beyond that, unless things have changed, google has no automatic
spam-detection and deletion mechanism, which means that when-ever there
was a sporge flood in any given group, google faithfully showed you each
and every one of those posts. Not something that's particularly
ergonomic for anyone who uses google-groups as their primary usenet
interface.

And if you report spam to Google you might as well be putting a note in a
bottle and tossing it in the ocean--they do not care and won't lift a finger
to stop abuse.

On 8/8/2011 8:48 PM, Home Guy wrote:
"A. Baum" wrote:

That's because G00gle Groups is not Usenet. Get a real Usenet
account, plenty of free servers that carry AHR if you can't
afford 6 bucks a month.

Absolutely no reason to spend money to read and post to usenet.

Use any usenet client you like (many are also e-mail clients) and any
one of many free NNTP servers.

Other than for binary file downloading, I dare anyone here to make a
cogent and logical argument why the use of a paid usenet account gets
you more than using a free server when it comes to reading and posting
to text groups.

Here's one. I used to subscribe to a moderated group and none of the
free servers worked with that group.

On Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:32:24 -0400, Home Guy wrote:

Oren wrote:

Microsoft did the same thing in recent years. They pulled all
the "official" MS groups back too their server farm.

No they didn't.

They basically turned off their usenet server - period.


I stand corrected. The damn NNTP server was shut down and MS now uses
wed based access for support.

No more official "public" MS newsgroups.

There was never anything "official" about the microsoft.public
hierarchy. Many people believed that Microsoft's servers was somehow in
control of that set of groups, but that implied an incorrect belief in
how usenet works.


"official" meaning MS MVPs participated in support on the groups.

Microsoft simply turned off their NNTP server. No action was required
by the rest of the "world-wide" network of usenet servers for those
groups to continue to exist - and thus they still do.

Yes they still exist, but without the support from MS people in the
know - IMO.

On Tue, 9 Aug 2011 08:27:20 -0700, "DGDevin"
wrote:



"Oren" wrote in message ...

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google Groups
going
back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy system.

Just wait until they launch Version 2.0

I've been happily reading Usenet since the mid 90s, so the old expression
don't fix it if it ain't broke comes to mind. Why would I want to wait for
a new version of something that in my observation has always been a pain in
the ass when the original Usenet is still working just fine after all these
years?

Whoosh!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTwnwbG9YLE

On 8/9/2011 2:25 PM, Tony Miklos wrote:
On 8/8/2011 8:48 PM, Home Guy wrote:
"A. Baum" wrote:

That's because G00gle Groups is not Usenet. Get a real Usenet
account, plenty of free servers that carry AHR if you can't
afford 6 bucks a month.

Absolutely no reason to spend money to read and post to usenet.

Use any usenet client you like (many are also e-mail clients) and any
one of many free NNTP servers.

Other than for binary file downloading, I dare anyone here to make a
cogent and logical argument why the use of a paid usenet account gets
you more than using a free server when it comes to reading and posting
to text groups.

Here's one. I used to subscribe to a moderated group and none of the
free servers worked with that group.

Request that the moderated group be added to their list of newsgroups.
Most newsadmins will willingly add most newsgroups upon request.

On 8/10/2011 5:30 PM, Hell Toupee wrote:
On 8/9/2011 2:25 PM, Tony Miklos wrote:
On 8/8/2011 8:48 PM, Home Guy wrote:
"A. Baum" wrote:

That's because G00gle Groups is not Usenet. Get a real Usenet
account, plenty of free servers that carry AHR if you can't
afford 6 bucks a month.

Absolutely no reason to spend money to read and post to usenet.

Use any usenet client you like (many are also e-mail clients) and any
one of many free NNTP servers.

Other than for binary file downloading, I dare anyone here to make a
cogent and logical argument why the use of a paid usenet account gets
you more than using a free server when it comes to reading and posting
to text groups.

Here's one. I used to subscribe to a moderated group and none of the
free servers worked with that group.

Request that the moderated group be added to their list of newsgroups.
Most newsadmins will willingly add most newsgroups upon request.

Many requests were made to numerous news servers but not one took care
of the problem. It was long ago, I think they carried the group and we
could post, but the posts never made it back to the moderating server.
Many servers that charged worked just fine. Finally found one that
worked and it was free, until they got too much traffic then they
charged $5/year. It's been years since I posted there, I don't know
what their current situation is.

"Oren" wrote in message ...


Whoosh!

Indeed, a text-only format can fool even the cynical.