Re: I am put off from joining this group because of all the spam
- From: Phil Cook <phil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 12:15:51 +0000
david.williams3305@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
From the reactions to the original post I feel I'm missing something,but I don't claim any technical expertise. I visit this website most
days and look at anything that interests me. There are an awful lot
of topics that are obviously junk, nothing to do with walking, far
more than on other forums I visit. Annoying, but no big deal. I
understand I could get every post as email, and filter them, but then
I assume I'd end up getting everything on one of those threads that
have a point for the first couple of exchanges, but then run to 200
posts of inconsequential chitchat. Whatever I did would take more
time than a single quick visit to a website. Or is there a better way
I don't know about?
This is Usenet, invented way back in the days of the Internet when
folk relied on dial up with modems running at glacial speeds. Messages
are posted as plain text to a news server from which you used to
download just the headers to start with and then mark the topics you
were interested in to download the bodies later. Google groups and
other websites where you can read and post here are just acting as a
GUI for the news feed.
All kinds of software were written to communicate directly with news
servers, called newsreaders or news clients, with varying degrees of
sophistication, most of which would filter messages. You can set
groups to behave differently, indeed I still have my newsreader set to
download all the bodies for this group whereas for others I just
download the headers. In these days of broadband I could just download
the lot but that would make it harder to read just the messages and
threads I am interested in, my newsreader will go through all new
messages with bodies on a repeated single keypress.
The other major advantage of a newsreader is the ability to killfile
certain posters or subjects so you never see them. I make a lot of use
of temporary KF on subject that expire after 30 days to get rid of
annoying threads that go off on wild tangents or descend into slanging
matches; these are quite prevalent on another group I read, but quite
rare on here.
--
Phil Cook looking north over the park to the "Westminster Gasworks"
.
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