Newsreaders

[Albert]

Hi,

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

What newsreader do you recommend, solely for comp.lang.c and why?

Thanks
Albert

 

[Richard Tobin]

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

Why would we switch to Google Groups?

-- Richard

 

[Albert]

Why would we switch to Google Groups?

It *might* be better than your newsreader which you haven't indicated.
I'm not certain as to what I mean by 'better' (as in the previous
sentence) since I haven't used a newsreader before (excluding Google
Groups).

 

[Richard Tobin]

Why would we switch to Google Groups?

[/QUOTE]

It *might* be better than your newsreader which you haven't indicated.

I'm not going to try every other newsreader just because it might
be better.

I'm not certain as to what I mean by 'better' (as in the previous
sentence) since I haven't used a newsreader before (excluding Google
Groups).

So if you haven't tried any others, why are you asking other people
why they haven't switched? Do you go round asking people why they
drink anything other than Budweiser?

-- Richard

 

[Harold Aptroot]

Hi,

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

What newsreader do you recommend, solely for comp.lang.c and why?

Thanks
Albert

Because using google groups sometimes makes you look like a spammer or a
noob.
Of course there are exceptions, so no offense to anyone

 

[James Kuyper]

Hi,

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

Why shouldn't we? Google Groups is a lousy news reader. It doesn't
provide message filtering. It doesn't keep track of which messages I've
already read. It can send a copy of the message to be sent to my
personal e-mail address, but it can't be set to do so automatically.
These are just a few of my issues with it.

It's also a lousy usenet archive, though it is, to the best of my
knowledge, the best available usenet archive.

What newsreader do you recommend, solely for comp.lang.c and why?

I make no recommendations. I use mozilla thunderbird because I'm
familiar with it, it's free, it runs on Linux, it's adequate to my
needs, and because it's the best newsreader of the small number of
newsreaders I've bothered trying out - but that number is too small to
justify making a general recommendation.

 

[Keith Thompson]

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

What newsreader do you recommend, solely for comp.lang.c and why?

How is comp.lang.c relevant to the choice of which newsreader to use?

 

[Kenny McCormack]

How is comp.lang.c relevant to the choice of which newsreader to use?

He's probably looking for one that has killfiles that actually work.
Lately, there's been some trouble in that area...

 

[Antoninus Twink]

He's probably looking for one that has killfiles that actually work.
Lately, there's been some trouble in that area...

In that case, he should definitely avoid Mozilla 4.75 running on
Windows 98...

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

It *might* be better than your newsreader which you haven't
indicated.

Most people do indicate which newsreader they use. If you look at the
whole message you will see:

X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001)

on Richard Tobin's messages and, for another example,

User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux)

on mine. Of course, this does not answer the why, but in my case the
answer is not interesting (familiarity and no reason to change).

 

[Rich Webb]

Why would we switch to Google Groups?

A counter question may be "Why wouldn't we filter on 'Message-ID
googlegroups.com'" and discard all posts originating at Google Groups?
To be fair, the latest spam wave from GG seems to have abated somewhat
but filtering out all GG posts does improve the signal to noise ratio.

 

[jfbode1029]

Hi,

Why do many of you use newsreaders other than the one provided by
Google Groups?

Because the Google Groups client *sucks*. No killfile or other
filtering capability, no ability to sort or flag articles by author or
keywords, a broken threading algorithm, spam spam spam spam spam spam
spam, etc.

What newsreader do you recommend, solely for comp.lang.c and why?

Thanks
Albert

The two I've used most recently were Pan for Linux-based systems and
Unison for Mac OS X. Both work reasonably well, and provide most of
the capabilities I mentioned above. Just about any newsreader works
for clc, since the content is exclusively text-based.

I use GG to surf from my work box, simply because I have no other
option.

 

[Albert]

Keith Thompson asked:

How is comp.lang.c relevant to the choice of which newsreader to use?

Maybe some newsreaders allow you to change the font which you read
from. I don't know if that's a browser setting, but it *might* be just
for other displays of web content. Maybe in some newsreaders you could
have non-code in one font, and code in one of the equally spaced
fonts; I haven't tried any newsreaders other than Google Groups, as
I've pointed out.

 

[Albert]

Richard Tobin wrote:
So if you haven't tried any others, why are you asking other people

why they haven't switched?

Because I think that if lots of people suggest one newsreader to use,
then I can use that one and not have to try other ones.

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

Because I think that if lots of people suggest one newsreader to use,
then I can use that one and not have to try other ones.

Tastes vary; just because one newsreader may be right for "lots of
people" doesn't mean it's right for you. If that were true, we'd all be
using the same one, and we're certainly not.

If you're interested in what various people here use, check out the
article titled "Stats for comp.lang.c" that is posted here periodically.
You will be most interested in the "Top 10 User Agents by poster" and
"Top 10 User Agents by number of posts" sections towards the end.

S

 

[Sjouke Burry]

It *might* be better than your newsreader which you haven't indicated.
I'm not certain as to what I mean by 'better' (as in the previous
sentence) since I haven't used a newsreader before (excluding Google
Groups).

Curious... So with only knowing google you see fit to
cast doubt on newsreaders.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

>
> It *might* be better than your newsreader which you haven't indicated.
> I'm not certain as to what I mean by 'better' (as in the previous
> sentence) since I haven't used a newsreader before (excluding Google
> Groups).

I do not think I can read the company local newsgroups with Google Groups...

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> James Kuyper wrote:
> [...]

> > [Google Groups] is also a lousy usenet archive, though it is, to the
> > best of my knowledge, the best available usenet archive.

>
> RIP, DejaNews.

Deja had also its flaws. The most visible was that it could miss large
numbers of articles. Google is better in that aspect because it has more
and better feeds. Altavista was really horrible on occasion.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> Keith Thompson asked:
>
> Maybe some newsreaders allow you to change the font which you read
> from. I don't know if that's a browser setting, but it *might* be just
> for other displays of web content.

You are assuming that all newsreadres are browser based. They are not. With
the newsreader I am using (do not look for it in the headers, it will not be
named there, but it is "rn") everything is textbased in a terminal window and
so everything is in the same monospaced font. Usenet groups are *not* web
content, they go beyond the web. For instance, the first Usenet feed
Australia got was by magnetic tape by aeroplane from Berkely in the US.
The first Usenet feed we got here was by dial-up phone line and modems at
the amazing speed of 2400 baud (one night each day was more than sufficient
for a complete feed).

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> If you're interested in what various people here use, check out the
> article titled "Stats for comp.lang.c" that is posted here periodically.
> You will be most interested in the "Top 10 User Agents by poster" and
> "Top 10 User Agents by number of posts" sections towards the end.

My newsreader will not figure their regardless of the number of articles
I post...