interest,
*repetitive andI can probably work out who the retailer was, John ;-).
I suppose it's fair to say that some folks like newsgoups with plenty of 'banter' / flaming / OT posting whereas others, me included, like something at least a little more focussed, without being too dry & humourless.
"Adrian" wrote
Just checked - 111 messages in the last 7 days.
John.
Easynet have recently stopped offering newsgroup access to name but one.
Interesting. I subscribed to DandEmodellers yesterday (was approved late last night) and haven't heard a peep out of the list yet.
I would have expected at least something during today if it has had 111 in the last week...
James Moody
"Jeff McGhie" wrote
My ISP (Kingston Communications in Hull) do offer newsgroup access, but it's capped and interminably slow which is why I use news.theplanet.net
John.
"James Moody" wrote
That will be Yahoo's fault. It often takes them a day or two (or more) to update their databases and start distributing (or even stop sending) postings to new (or cancelled) members.
John.
Personally, I'd like to wipe Ebay and its ilk (if there are any ilk left) off the internet - but that's just me ranting.
Personally, I'd like to see every unemployed human being on the planet being forced to sell themselves on eBay to the highest bidder, who could then use his purchase for philosophical discourse, medical spare parts, reduction to fertilisers, or personal use and abuse, as he/she so desired - but that's just me being a raving loonie.:)
Cheers, Steve
"Steve W" wrote
Bloody Nora ................ you'd be offering to cut my taxes if that came off! :-)
John.
Yup, we did it with North Sea Oil, we did it with the privatisation of state industries, we even did it with sale-and-leaseback of lamp-posts... now there's not a lot left that's sellable in the family silver cupboard... just the populace themselves!
Unfortunately, the only way I'd ever get a bid of more than £0.99 on my own good self is to be auctioned through Aldo the Magnificent... ONLY FOR YOU!!! :)
Cheers, Steve
I must just have been lucky then - All the ISPs I have used or have set-up for other people have had useful USENET access (Global Internet, IC24, EntaNet, NTL, Demon, GXN, BT, Bulldog, Tiscali, Freeserve/Wanadoo).
Perhaps I'm just a Luddite, but I prefer USENET to Yahoo! Groups.
Adrian
Very much so, over the years I've found that Yahoo is little more than a source of spam, that it's damn near impossible to unsubscribe from some groups and that yahoo groups have nothing of the vitality of the Usenet or even bog standard web based bulletin boards. Wouldn't touch them again with a barge pole.
I currently subscribe to 30+ Yahoo groups and can honestly say I never get spam from any of them. (ok, not never... very occasionally one of the slightly less well run groups lets a spammer slip through, and one rather badly run rail-gen newsgroup had a bad patch with someone creating endless polls, before the group was reborn with new management who have transformed the place)
Some Yahoo groups simply have no equal on usenet. The rail-gen groups for example give me live coverage of unusual trains passing through my area and I've got many a pic thanks to info gleaned that way. The JRForum has no equal to the help, information and advice that I have received on modelling Japanese railways anywhere in the english speaking world. (Including my asking for help regarding the station frontage at Ochanamizu resulting in one of the members taking a visit to it and getting pics of -exactly- the information I required! superb!!)
Pete
Out of interest, which gen groups do you recommend?
Adrian
Well I'm in Bristol and as such my groups reflect that.
Southe West Rail Gen:
Pete
...
It's a case of once bitten twice shy, I've been on-line since the days of dial-up bbs file sharing ... even ran my own for a short while on what was then a brand new Atari ST, hence I've been aware of Yahoo since the days of "Wow! You want to send your link to these people ... they're starting a directory". Yahoo may be very good nowadays ... or even have been for the past few years but it would take a lot for me to want to come back.
Chris,
When I got on the Internet at first, it was via Compuserve which had all its forums. Then the Compuserve forums seemed to fall out of favour and started to wither, and Usenet became the preferred place. Then the predecessors of Yahoo started up their email lists and now we have Yahoo, which looks a lot like Compuserve did over ten years ago :-)
Jim.
Wasn't aware of that happening, hadn't noticed anything on list to indicate that prior to the group's disappearance.
I suppose the question I should've asked is who deleted demod and why.
Not that knowing the answer will bring demod back, but it helps in life if you know who's a silly **** and who isn't.
"Ben C" wrote
You wouldn't notice anything, because nothing was announced - by being 'frozen out of the group' I meant that the people in question were not allowed to post. Under those circumstances it's hardly surprising that they left and created their own group.
I've got a very strong suspicion as to what happened, but as I don't have any proof I wouldn't want to make my suspicion public.
John.
John,
In one of the D&E mailing lists a month or so ago, there was a discussion on why D&E modellers did not seem to have a very good press from the railway modelling community in general. I would suspect that all of the palaver over their mailing lists in the past few years certainly hasn't helped matters.
I got more interested in the UK D&E scene over the last two years to help out a friend in the far east who is modelling ECML with OLE. It has been an interesting time trying to get involved in the scene and I doubt that I have got anywhere near understanding what is going on, far less getting much information about modelling the UK D&E scene. I am pretty well clued up on the faults of Bachmann, Heljan and Hornby 4mm scale products, but not much else.
I also joined DEMU and that was an experience similar to others. It took weeks to get any response to a completed membership form and a cheque and I had to help that along with an email asking what was going on. I do accept that office bearers in model railway societies are volunteers, but I have never found another society which takes so long to take your money, and, in general, seems to have great difficulty in maintaining deadlines. :-)
I don't know if its an indicator of the health of a modelling group, but trying to get accurate prototype information of the D&E scene is extremely difficult. I am not sure if that information is genuinely difficult to get at, or whether the information has been got, but is not being made available. To model a loco I'm interested in, I'm going to have to do a 300 mile round trip to do my own measuring up on a preserved example (if I can get that access). That will mean 'crawling all over a loco' which was a method ridiculed by Steve Jones on DEModellers(deceased), but he never came up with any alternative method of getting accurate information.
So modelling the D&E scene in the UK is not all that easy, unless you buy your stuff ready made over the counter, and the present supporters don't seem to be able to see much beyond that.
Jim.
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