Attention: GOOGLE users. Please read.

For those of you reading messages on rec.crafts.jewelry on the Google news service,
please be aware that Google's interface can cause some confusion.

Google, in addition to offering access to the current newsgroup messages, also offers
access to the historical archives of this group. Unfortunately, their interface makes
no distinction between current messages and old ones, and the display does not make the
date of a message as prominent as it might be.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of postings I've had to reject to
this group because they are reply posts to very old messages. Often, these are replies
to messages sent to the group before it became moderated in 1997. Obviously, I cannot
approve and post such messages, especially when they are responses to "for sale"
advertisements that appeared in the group before it became moderated. Such ads are no
longer allowed.

Please, dear Google users, before replying to a posting you found in this group, make
sure the posting is reasonably current. Most of the world reads this group on standard
news servers, which generally only offer messages that are at most six to eight weeks
old, deleting messages older than that. So replying to older messages will simply be
confusing to readers who no longer see the messages you're replying to. If, after
noting that a message is old, you still wish to continue the topic, feel free to, but
may I suggest you do it with a new posting, restarting the topic with a subject header
of your choosing, rather than doing it with a reply posting to the old message.
Again, this is up to your good judgment, if the old message really is relevant. Just
be aware that replying to old messages can be confusing.

For more information on posting to this group, please review the FAQ posting I've sent
to the group every so often. If you're unsure, feel free to contact me (the moderator)
via email, or ask in the group, for guidance.

thank you.

Peter Rowe
moderator
rec.crafts.jewelry

Is it this new "BETA" form of Google that is creating this confusion?
Please reply with the email address of the Google department which can
receive comments and complaints about Beta. Thanks.

C.C.

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 07:56:50 -0800, in ?? wrote:

Is it this new "BETA" form of Google that is creating this confusion?
Please reply with the email address of the Google department which can
receive comments and complaints about Beta. Thanks.

C.C.

First, understand that as moderator of rec.crafts.jewelry, Neither I nor the group
itself has any sort of official connection with Google. (Another misconception). The
newsgroup existed long before Google came into being, even in it's moderated form.
Google, for me, is simply another news server out there, one of many, but it offers
users the ease of a web based interface, plus it purchased and now continues and offers
the archives of usenet groups, which normally are not archived on most news servers.
But the fact that rec.crafts.jewelry can be accessed on Google, does not mean I have
anything to do with Google, or particularly know who or where you should go to contact
them. So I'm afraid you'll have to research that email address on your own, or perhaps
some other group reader will fill it in. I'm frankly not quite familier enough with
them to have found that info. I only use there newsgroup interface to reference archive
posts when needed, which until recently, wasn't often. For normal newsgroup access, I
prefer standard news servers (I use Earthlink), which are generally faster, post
messages sometimes as much as a day sooner, and don't edit postings Google offers only
text based messages. Those newsgroups offering binary files (attachments, HTML
formatted postings, etc, which doesn't apply to rec.crafts.jewelry, but does apply to
many others) cannot be accessed via Google (the sizes of such posts make it impossible
to reasonably archive them).

As to what's caused this increase in confusion, I'm not sure. Their new software
version may blur the distinction between current and old messages more than was the case
before, or it may also well be that the recent introduction of the Mozilla Firefox web
browser has something to do with it. Mozilla defaults to the Google home page as it's
home page when you install it, and there may thus be an increase in the awareness and
use of Google as a newsgroups interface. By the way, if you've not yet discovered
Firefox, and are frustrated at times with Internet Explorer, you may wish to give
Firefox a try. I like it a lot, finding it faster and more stable than Internet
Explorer. Just my two cents. Your mileage may vary...

Peter Rowe
moderator
rec.crafts.jewelry

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 09:17:49 GMT, "Peter W.. Rowe,"
wrote:

For those of you reading messages on rec.crafts.jewelry on the Google news service,
please be aware that Google's interface can cause some confusion.

So please sign up for another free newsspool,
http://news.individual.net/, for example, and use a free newsreader.

--
Marilee J. Layman

Peter W.. Rowe, wrote:

By the way, if you've not yet discovered
Firefox, and are frustrated at times with Internet Explorer, you may wish to give
Firefox a try. I like it a lot, finding it faster and more stable than Internet
Explorer. Just my two cents. Your mileage may vary...


I have been using Firefox for several months now. It is a killer ap! However,
it may not be for everyone. Is is open source and is still has a fair number of
bugs to be ironed out. "Fair number" is an understatement. There are almost
20,000 bugs right now. Yes, that's TWENTY THOUSAND!
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist...roduct=Firefox) The same goes for
Thunderbird, an open source Mozilla email client.

Peter, just wait till, one day, you will find all of your bookmarks wiped out,
you have collected over the last two years. Not a pretty picture. At least you
can protect yourself against that one now, by installing the bookmark backup
extension.

But don't get me wrong. I love Firefox and have dumped IE. Even, the U.S.
government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers
to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3374931

Later,

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com

I just took a look at GOOGLE, I think they have really improved the
USENET layout, I could actually find rec.crafts.jewelry the first time I
tried. That hasn't always been the case.

The articles seem to be ordered by date and I don't see any excuse for
replying to older articles, although I'm sure people are doing it. It
may happen when people do a subject search and get an older article,
even then the date is right there to read.

There is an old saying; "10% or the people never get the word" it looks
to me like it is more like 50% on the internet.

wrote:
User-Agent: tin/1.6.2-20030910 ("Pabbay") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.8-RC (i386))
Lines: 11
Message-ID: o.net
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:43:05 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: 216.139.147.7
X-Complaints-To:
X-Trace: newsread1.dllstx09.us.to.verio.net 1103611385 216.139.147.7 (Tue, 21 Dec 2004
06:43:05 GMT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:43:05 GMT

Is it this new "BETA" form of Google that is creating this confusion?
Please reply with the email address of the Google department which can
receive comments and complaints about Beta. Thanks.

They say they read all the messages from:
http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request.py


Let's thank Peter for the notification. This oddity has been
popping up in vs NGs.

Richard Friesen wrote:
User-Agent: tin/1.6.2-20030910 ("Pabbay") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.8-RC (i386))
Lines: 6
Message-ID: o.net
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:45:27 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: 216.139.147.7
X-Complaints-To:
X-Trace: newsread1.dllstx09.us.to.verio.net 1103611527 216.139.147.7 (Tue, 21 Dec 2004
06:45:27 GMT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:45:27 GMT

The articles seem to be ordered by date and I don't see any excuse for
replying to older articles

Google seems to thread macroscopically by Subject: so people
might well reply to a 2000 post apparently threaded with a bunch
from 2004.

Abrasha wrote:
Peter W.. Rowe, wrote:


By the way, if you've not yet discovered
Firefox, and are frustrated at times with Internet Explorer, you may wish to give
Firefox a try. I like it a lot, finding it faster and more stable than Internet
Explorer. Just my two cents. Your mileage may vary...



I have been using Firefox for several months now. It is a killer ap! However,
it may not be for everyone. Is is open source and is still has a fair number of
bugs to be ironed out. "Fair number" is an understatement. There are almost
20,000 bugs right now. Yes, that's TWENTY THOUSAND!
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist...roduct=Firefox) The same goes for
Thunderbird, an open source Mozilla email client.

Peter, just wait till, one day, you will find all of your bookmarks wiped out,
you have collected over the last two years. Not a pretty picture. At least you
can protect yourself against that one now, by installing the bookmark backup
extension.

But don't get me wrong. I love Firefox and have dumped IE. Even, the U.S.
government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers
to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3374931

Later,

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com
Preferably sooner than later,
set up a dual boot to linux ,
whatever version you fancy,
Use firefox with that and you wouldnt have lost your bookmarks.
Im using Slackware 10 courtesy of my guru son on computers.
Ive conquerer and Firefox with bookmarks duplicated in both.
Sort of belt and braces.
Its anvil stable.
Ted.

"Ted Frater"

Peter, just wait till, one day, you will find all of your bookmarks
wiped out,
you have collected over the last two years.

The old versions of windows had folders with email and bookmarks requiring
little effort to backup. I spent an hour the other day looking for these
folders and gave up. Is there no simple way to find them in XP?

I switched to Firefox a month ago and never looked back. It's hardly awsome
but has some features I like a lot and no downside yet.

Thunderbird on the other hand, does not seem ready for prime time. The real
turnoff was the way it deals with junk mail. Incredibly clever but
unfortunately, it must download all the junk to sort it out. This helps not
one bit on a dial up. Outlook allows one to delete it from the server and
never see it.

js


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