Aaaaargh

Its amazing how many people think they can get rich off the Internet after giving a workshop constant their last welfare check. When it gets hot there Ill make iced Java. I cant post anymore using Google Groups and FireFox on Linux. I have to use Vista and IE8. AAARRRRRGGGGG.

Jim

I recommend that you really use a decent usenet client: Pan, Knode, NN, SLRN, ... Something! Also, use one of the free usenet servers that are available or get a very inexpensive account on one of the paid servers. It makes life much better than google groups.

Aaron W. Hsu

Google Groups never forgets. I cant believe Google and Firefox are confused on how to handshake using a Form function from first generation HTTP 1.0 Luckily it still works for everything else requiring Form.

Jim

It works now. All I did was unchecked the box Stay Logged In when I Login. I believe that is a new box.

Jim

I don't know what Google Groups you've been using, but I have had a terrible time with getting Google Groups to find old messages that I wanted, and there were times when whole groups just up and disappeared.

For myself, I actually use Giganews, which has very nice retention rates, and I don't think they ever expire any text newsgroup. They don't have the older things from when they were still expiring text groups, but if I really need to search that far back, I can use Google Groups for the search.

Aaron W. Hsu

The messages aren't gone, but the Google Groups indices are getting corrupted. And there's nobody at Google that seems to care about reports about the problems.

There are a lot of messages that I can find by message-id but not by keywords, for instance. Doing searches by keyword often fails completely.

As far as I can tell, google uses the Google Groups operation as a dumping ground for their less competent employees... if indeed they actually have any employees there at all and aren't just letting everything run on automatic.

--scott

The Group search doesnt work like their literal Internet search. Im not sure its even keyword based. I think it is topic based on the thread. If I cant find it one way I try another. All the threads by author by date seems reliable. Sometimes I use site:http:// groups.google.com/ or simply rec.food.drink.tea with their search engine. Google Groups never forgets but it is hide and seek sometimes.

Jim

Go to Advanced Group Search. It used to work. Now it doesn't.

Google bought the Dejanews archives and have been successively making them less and less useful as time as gone on. Dejanews indexing and searching was much more comprehensive, it was faster, and it had a better user interface and did not attempt to hide the fact that Usenet was a public and distributed service and not a proprietary Google one.

--scott

It doesnt get any more obvious than clicking:

This is a Usenet group - learn more

Its not a Google problem. Its the uneducated WWW net citizens who think everything is a blog and couldnt care less about anything called Usenet. DejaNews would have died on the vine and all content lost without Google. Ive trained myself not to look at the ads. I wished they would index with their Internet search engine like you see it used on some repository websites. Im still not aware of any posts that have disappeared. I use my memory trying to find old posts that I know are there.

Jim