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Number   :  4373
Date     :  2003-04-20
Author   :  meirman@e...
Subject  :  Re: This discussion group.
Size(KB) :  7


 At 03:53 AM 4/16/03 -0500, Kan Yabumoto wrote:
>Hi, all:
>
>Since last June, our XXCOPY discussion group has been
>the most popular group in its category (Backup). But, I
>just noticed that our group is no longer No. 1 in the
>category any more. A relatively new group called
>"Pocketpcwares" surpassed us in recent days :-(
>
>Still, the volume of the messages posted in our group
>is much larger than most other groups. Looking back
>the early days (first few weeks), I was really concerned

How long ago did this start?

>with the fate of this group. Now, it seems that
>the membership is quite solid. Also, the annoying
>spammer(s) who posted junk messages finally gave up.
>
>What I really appreciate is that many of the veteran
>XXCOPY users with in-depth knowledge in how XXCOPY
>works are helping newcomers in this group.
>
>Our membership has been steadily increasing (about
>one new member per day on the average). So, a year
>from now, we will see the member count reach the
>1000 mark.
>
>On the other hand, when we view the archived messages
>on its web page, we sometimes see the size of the
>Yahoo advertising gradually increasing... So,
>viewing the messages on the Yahoo web site is not
>very good --- also, the web-page version removes
>the original indentation of the text which sometimes
>makes the post harder to read. From my perspective,
>as the "owner/moderator", the group maintenance
>hardly takes any of my time except that I try to
>provide accurate answer to some tricky questions
>(but that's besides the format of the venue). So,
>this group is, in a way, pretty convenient.
>
>I wonder if it's time for us to consider making
>this group to be one of the usenet newsgroups.
>I'm quite ignorant about the mechanics of how a
>newsgroup is formed, and maintained.

I'm going to try to discuss this neutrally. There are a lot of mailing
lists that I wish were newsgroups instead, but, primarily because most
threads are short, and partly because traffic is moderate, and because
thread names are rarely if ever changed, I can keep track of all the
threads. So wrt this list, I'm fairly neutral. Also most people here
quote what they are referring to. Most of the newsgroups I read people
have use good formatting, but on the non-technical mailing lists, it's a
jungle. This list is by not.

>My first question is that XXCOPY is not just a pure
>freeware but it is a commercial product. Maybe,
>this fact alone may not go well with the otherwise,
>product-neutral (non-commercial) nature of most
>newsgroups.

But there are a lot of commercial products that have newsgroups, two for
Agent, one for Eudora, a couple dozen for Netscape, there used to be dozens
for Symantec/Norton until they switched to their own website, and there are
hundreds for Microsoft Products. Trumpet tcp/ip dialer had 7, but the
product is no longer popular. Plus many others for products I don't own.
All of these are on the Erols.com news server, even though the Microsoft
groups are on some Microsoft server, and Netscape has its own server. I
think I can read this groups on both their server and the Erols server, but
I don't know exactly how the whole thing works. The others I named have no
special server afaik.

>I believe Google's (and other services') archives
>on a newsgroup is probably more complete than that
>of the Yahoo group's.

Google's, absolutely. In addition, one can click on the message id in
several news readers and be routed straight to the same post within
Groups.google.com. Using "Newsdde.exe". Thene can view the whole thread.

Search abilities are much better -- date ranges, optional and required
search terms and searching on exact phrases. Although if one specifies one
or a set of newsgroups, it doesn't actually limit the search to that set of
groups. I wrote to them about this when they were in Beta, but they didn't
change it. Still, I haven't tested it, but if I were to include the
newsgroup name in the search terms, that might well limit it to just that
group,

And when you find one post, you can then read the whole thread in
groups.google. AFAICT, that's not true with Yahoo lists. When it says
"sort by thread" Yahoo only means sort the articles currently showing on
one screen's worth of headers by thread. In Yahoo, at the bottom, you can
click on posts in reply to the one you are looking at, but you can't just
scroll through the whole thread. (BTW, as an aside, people reading Yahoo
lists on-line know the sequential number of the article they are reading,
but those who get the articles by email do not.)

>Any comments by someone with the know-how on this
>subject? What are the pros and cons of such a move?

Personally I don't have any cons except that some others don't seem to want
it.

Lists on Agent seems to take less attention from me than email lists.
Maybe that because one can set the articles to be deleted automatically
when they are older than whatever number of days one sets. And the
articles still exist on my ISP for 30 or so days, whether I download or
not. When I go out of town, I have to suspend the mailing of some mailing
lists because since I won't be downloading my mail, my mailbox can fill up.
Then I have to read the mailing list on Yahoo if at all, and I find that
much slower and more inconvenient than downloading them.

With Agent and Free Agent one only has to click once to dl new headers, and
one can have different preferences for each newsgroup. One preference
settable for each ng is whether or not to download bodies for every header
downloaded "Retrieve bodies for all new messages". So that's just one
click total. When I only had on my list ng's I read regularly, I would use
the one click/download headers for all groups, and it would then download
articles for any groups I had it set for.

>Also, is there a convenient way to receive a
>notification email when someone posts a message
>at the newsgroup? 

When I had a much slower modem, I used to download headers for all groups
(one click), and while I did that, I would either be reading email or
reading the first few articles in the first group at the top of the group
list. But with my fast modem, I usually pick and choose which group I
download for. A message shows at the bottom of the screen. "Retrieving up
to 33 new headers for news.group.name." It says "up to" because
occasionally there is a missing article and subtracting the previous ending
number from the current ending number doesn't give exactly the right answer.

Agent has about 20 levels of indentation, so that one can tell a thread's
heirarchical relationships. It has a lot of other features.

It's true that they use autobots to harvest email addresses, and what
people do is put a despammed address in place like meirmanNOSPAM AT
erols.com. This slows down people who want to email the person directly,
but not so much.

I notice that about half the
>group members stop subscribing the email after
>some time. I guess people get annoyed with too
>many Emails from the board after a while.

This list doesn't have so many emails now, compared to others I read. I
doubt that they're annoyed but they just aren't interested enough.

>Kan Yabumoto
>

Meir 

meirman@e... Baltimore, MD, USA



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