Help Viewing Long Topics

Get a decent newsreader, it's the best option and far better than web-based solutions like Google as most posts appear immediately in Usenet while Google and Yahoo can take hours to refresh.

There are configuration options in Google Groups, but I've never mastered them in the occasional situation where I need to use it.

Agent

is probably the best news and email client, but it does depend on what kind of newsfeed your ISP has. There is a fre one and a paid-for one available.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Not sure I understand why a person would use Google when you can see i

all direct at:

Also there is a "view first unread" link near the top left of the pag that neatly takes you down to the latest post you have not seen. Tha seems to be a recent addition to rcgroups.com, and sometimes it doe not appear. I have no idea why not. But it's right there most of th time. And extremely handy

-- rocket_ji

----------------------------------------------------------------------- rocket_jim's Profile:

this thread:

I recently changed from my ISP's proprietory news/e-mail reader to Thunderbird which is free and available from :

Response time (I know this is to some extent dependent upon your ISP) is in the order of seconds. My own posts often appear before I have finished reading a thread (particularly in _this_ group) since I have set it to refresh automatically ever minute.

You can set it to show all or unread or a variety of 'types' that you define (business, important etc.) and sort & display as time posted or 'threaded'.

It took me all of 5 minutes to install and set up.

JG

Peter/JG thanks for that but I am really a fish out of water with these things. Can I install alongside Outlook Express or do I need to disable that? Can I continue to use IE or do I need to change to Firefox? Obviously interested in the free ones initially. I'm with BT at the moment should they provide a "newsreader"? Sorry I'm a bit thick on this one (and on much more if you listen to "her indoors")

Regards

Keith

Thanks for that link, I've not found that route in before. I notice that on some of the topics the number of replies differs from the number of messages for the same topic on Google, are there some missing or do they count differently. I also haven't found the "view first unread message" link yet but I'll keep looking. I might still try a newsreader though as I visit a number of different forum, on second thoughts better check whats available on rcgroups.com/forums first. Thanks.

Regards

Keith

You have e-mail (assuming your address is valid).

JG

I don't know much about rcgroups, but they are a bit naughty in that they retain postings which are deleted from this group. I have my system set to delete posts after 30 days or some such, Google groups respects that but I found one of my old posts on rcgroups when searching on some related topic. This might explain some of the discrepancy in numbers of posts.

Cheers Tim

Dutton Dry-Dock Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs Vintage diesel engine service

We use Opera as a browser and Agent for news/email. We have IE6 on the machines and Outlook Distress is on them but folks are threatened with dire consequences if they ever us it!

Firefox has some funny ways with non-compliant HTML webpages, but we have that as well just in case.

Some sites like Google Gmail work fine with Firefox but not with IE6 or Opera.

Agent can be installed as a standalone alongside everything else as can Thunderbird and Eudora, another one we forgot to mention.

The beauty of Agent is the comprehensive facilities like mail sorting and kill files, and as it is doing nothing else but mail and news, it does it much better than almost anything else. I have tried both Eudora and Thunderbird, I would slightly lean to Eudora out of the two.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Rita uses Agent at home with no problems, and my sister also uses it, so it can't be that bad! :-))

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

I see you are on Demon, so I presume you replaced Turnpike. I have always found TP quite satisfactory (and a whole world better than Outlook) so I was curious toy know what you found was better about Thunderbird. Since I have about 10 years' worth of e-mails in my mail folders, it would have to be good to move though....

Sorry, I realise this is OT.

David

So we have some 'thread drift' :)) what's new!

I can't understand how you get the impression that I am on Demon.

Zetnet is the only ISP I've ever used and their ZIMACS is the newsreader that I've been using for nearly 10 years. The trial of Thunderbird came about due to a customer (not on Zetnet) needing a newsreader since it would be easier for him to ask a support question directly rather than relaying it through me.

Thunderbird is not the be-all-and-end-all though but I find the display more to my liking. I still haven't had time to get to grips with filtering but the main reason I'm sticking with it for now is that I can set it to do an automatic 'fetch' every minute - rather than open the program (ZIMACS) and then fetch new postings manually.

JG

At this rate, we'll soon have a system where our posts appear before we've written them

Regards, Tony

Sorry, misread the headers!

David

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:51:34 +0100, Tim Leech

How do you do that Tim? On Google (useful for archive searching and mobile access) I can see your posts from years back

Charles

Any settings to delete messages that you may have put upon your computer only affect your computer. Once the message is sent out to the other news servers, it is for all intents and purposes, a permanent resident of the web, and can be found if you look in the right places. Even recall instructions will not kill one of your own messages, unless your news server is set to honor them (most are not, apparently due to abuse) AND the message must not have been propagated out to the other news servers of the net (same deal, mostly set to not honor recall requests).

At one time you could include an expresion in the sig file or the body of the message ("X-No Archive" IIRC), and the message would not be stored, but I doubt that works either in this day of inexpensive storage.

Google bought the achives of Deja News IIRC and have pretty much all the posts to most of the non-binary newsgroups in there somewhere.

The rcgroups site is just an web portal to a newsgroups server, and I would not expect it to be any different than the rest of the news servers.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Somewhere buried in Agent group preferences is the option "prevent usenet messages being archived" or some such.

I only set it that way a few months back, so older posts will still be on Google groups. If you look for this posting on Google groups, you should find a note saying something to the effect that "the poster has requested that this message be deleted after xxx days". This is what rcgroups seem not to respect. Of course, it doesn't work when people reply to your post & don't tick the box which says to respect 'no archiving'. In fact, I've only just discovered that *that* box exists

Cheers Tim

Dutton Dry-Dock Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs Vintage diesel engine service

--Who's your ISP? If you switch to one that includes "shell" all your troubles are over. I use a nifty little program called putty to access newsgroups and article threading and reply source is visually obvious, so one can ignore specific postings with ease. It's also dead easy to write killfiles, to make obnoxious stuff invisible.

the header:-

X-No-Archive: yes

Instructs archives that honour it not to archive a post. The concept was introduced by DejaNews. It is, however, completely voluntary and will also have no effect at all on news servers. How long a message stays on a news server is dependant entirely on the configuration of the server (and the size of the operator's storage budget). I have used Giganews for six years now and their current retention period for non-binary news groups is 1110 days.

The inference that "the poster has requested that this message be deleted after xxx days" Is purely an artifact of Google's policies for _their_ retention of posts wit the X-No-Archive header active.

Smile, your knowledge and wit will be circulating around Usenet long after you are dead :-)

Mark Rand RTFM

Snipped everything.

The best of all is to have a British Archimedes/Risc PC/Ionix computer running RISC OS. Pluto will deal with your mail and newsgroups in a way you will understand.

The BBC computer followed on by the Archimedes and the Risc PC were in every case technologically far ahead of anything that IBM and Microsoft could produce.

Sad isn't it.

Donald South Uist.