New Google Group

How does a Google group relate to a Usenet newsgroup? Does Google send the posts through Usenet? Would be nice if they did. What a mess Yahoo has made with their "groups" nonsense, skirting and diverting what should be on Usenet.

Google groups and Usenet Newsgroups are two different animals. If you are familiar with Yahoo groups, well then, Google groups is similar just hosted by Google instead of Yahoo.

Lane

That's too bad.

Since

Just Me wrote: : Google groups and Usenet Newsgroups are two different animals. If you are : familiar with Yahoo groups, well then, Google groups is similar just hosted : by Google instead of Yahoo.

--It's funny but the more these alternatives like Yahoo groups pop up, the more I love usenet. Shell is the "killer app" and the more bells and whistles (and ads!!) folks tack onto it the worse it is to use the web. IMNSHO, heh.

I thought Google groups replaced (bought out) the old DejaNews. If so, they are the same groups as Usenet- or at least all Usenet groups are google groups, but maybe Google creates groups that work through its interface but are not available via Usenet.

I had a lot of trouble with my ISPs new server, and used Google groups interface for awhile, but did not like it. I prefer my Thunderbird news reader. I also tried various free or very low cost alternate news servers, never did find anything I like. However, if my ISP's server goes bad again, I will return to Google.

I found all my Usenet groups on Google groups.

DejaNews was not *part* of usenet, but the (for their own reasons) archived it. Usenet has *no* commercial connections anywhere. Normal usenet reading is with dedicated programs through either the NNRP (Net News Reader Protocol), or by working on the machine which has a news server spool directory on it. There are thousands (or probably by now tens of thousands) of news servers. Some carry all newgroups, others (such as mine) are rather picky -- because I don't have either the bandwidth or the disk space to get a full feed.

When I ran a news server for an Army R&D lab's network, we were only able to carry the main eight newsgroup heirarchies, and

Usenet *used* to be distributed by unix systems talking to other unix systems via the uucp (Unix to Unix Communications Protocol), via dialup connections. Now, most (perhaps all?) are carried through the internet, using NNTP (Net News Transport Protocol).

DejaNews (and later Google) provided a web-based access to usenet news -- at least those articles which don't have an "X-No-Archive: " header set. Unlike usenet spool directories, Google's archives go bac to the beginning of usenet. Usenet spool directories have much shorter expire times -- from as little as a half day (on very busy newsgroups with very large articles -- typically in the alt.binaries.* heirarchies) to whatever the news admin sees fit. I tend to run a 28 day expire on a few newsgroups that I particularly like, and a week or less on most others.

For that matter, I run a gateway between one specific usenet newsgroup and a specific YahooGroups mailing list.

Yes -- as I said, they archive (almost) *everything*. They also provide a posting interface, but it apparently takes a long time for a posted article to make it into Google's own newsreader, let alone to the rest of the world.

Enjoy, DoN.