Re: Comcast no longer supports usenet

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:08:49 -0700 (PDT), mtb Dad
<listerfarrar@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Noobie question.

I've only ever accessed this group through Google. What is a news
reader and why is it better?

Thanks!
L

Dear L,

When you use Google Groups, you use your internet browser program and
view threads stretching back to the crack of doom. (Google Groups is
by far the best archive to search for old RBT posts.)

Click on a thread, and you see a long tree of posts, and you can move
up and down and read them.

But all the posts are there, all the time, all the time. Your browser
can't change what Google Groups displays.

A news reader is a program devoted to handling news groups. You give
it a url, a login, and password to a news server (a site that holds
threads and posts like Google), and the newsreader program copies the
new threads and posts from the site to your computer in a couple of
seconds and takes care of filtering, indexing, and displaying them.

With a news reader, you browse the downloaded threads and posts, just
as you do with Google Groups.

But you can delete posts and threads that you've read and filter out
stuff that you don't want to bother with.

A newsreader offers more options and faster navigation than Google
Groups.

I use an old free newsreader, Forte Free Agent, to grab RBT from the
www.motzarella.org free news server site. There are lots of other
newsreaders and news servers.

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:
http://i33.tinypic.com/29cvvbc.jpg

Red means new posts. Clicking on any thread expands the whole thread
to the tree view. The green icons on the left mean that I've read and
protected the posts so that I don't accidentally delete them (you can
get them back if you do). I can mark and delete posts and threads with
a click or two, jump around easily, and generally waste my time more
rapidly and efficiently.

Like most such things, until you try it and spend a little time
learning how to use it, the advantages of the newsreader over using
your browser to connect to Google Groups aren't obvious.

As an analogy, Google Groups lets you use your internet browser as a
file viewer with no filters that will eventually let you wade through
RBT and see any post.

A newsreader is a much more powerful file viewer that lets you spend
more time viewing the files than navigating or scrolling past files
that you didn't want to view.

Google Groups is not nearly as bad as some news reader enthusiasts
insist. There's no law against taking a brief, horrified look at
newsreaders and deciding that you don't need them. Plenty of people
are happy riding fixies.

I'm fond of my ancient Forte Free Agent, but most posters use other
news reader programs.

Here's a site with more about news readers:
http://www.newsreaders.com/

In the unlikely event that anyone wants the ~4mb install program for
the no longer available Forte Free Agent, an email will cause one to
appear. I imagine that there are newer and better programs, but I hate
to change.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel
.

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