Okay, very old, but I put this one aside to reply to "later", and
it *is* something that bugs me, so ....
If you're referring to the fact that Googlegroups provides a rating
feature is there a Usenet rule which says that no interface to
Usenet should provide a rating feature ? Beyond that I consider the
statement "trying to make it" highly exaggerated. If Google somehow
managed to gain control of a large percentage of newservers and
changed the content of what people posted when passing through
those servers then you might say that Google tries to turn Usenet
into whatever. As things stand Google only controls their own
interface so they cannot turn Usenet into anything even if they
wanted.
I've never used Facebook but youtube has no connection that I can
see with a popularity contest.
I would want to see some statistics from a reliable source to be
convinced of that but even if we accept it's true are there Usenet
rules which specify what measures against spam an entity providing
Usenet access should undertake ? Does Google on the average take
less measures against spam compared to other entities providing
Usenet access ?
Probably, since as far as I can tell Google takes *no* measures
to restrict spam postings. (Indeed, if they're to provide a
comprehensive archive, I think a case can be made for their *not*
taking such measures, though it might be nice if they provided
some sort of filtering so that users could opt not to view posts
identified as probable spam.)
It does ? I would have thought it counts against it and a lot too.
I'm mainly tempted to switch away from Googlegroups when I go to
the page of most recent posts and see a large percentage of them
being spam.
When I asked about rules I was thinking of specific RFCs or at
least unwritten rules which many people feel are established
netiquette and which Google doesn't follow. I assumed that's the
kind of rules Richard Bos had in mind when he said earlier about
Google not following Usenet rules. Here's an example of the kind of
thing I was looking for : if every time one posted from
Googlegroups a 5 lines signature was automatically added to their
message that would qualify. Or if the headers of messages coming
from Googlegroups did not conform to the required format that would
also qualify. The Google interface is irrelevant unless there are
Usenet rules specifying what anyone's interface to Usenet should or
should not look like or behave. As for people posting through
Googlegroups breaking rules it's debatable to what extent one
should hold Google responsible. I was thinking of stuff Google
has direct control over.
Okay, here are two glitches with quoted text -- and I haven't
confirmed that these still happen, but they did the last time
I checked:
(*) Anything in quoted text that looks like an e-mail address
(and this includes message IDs and URLs with "@" characters, if
I remember right) is munged as part of a misguided-in-my-opinion
attempt to protect users from attempts to harvest their e-mail
addresses.
(*) Spaces after URLs in quoted text are (sometimes?) removed.
I think they also don't always preserve poster's attempts to do
their own paragraph formatting (e.g., inserting line breaks), but
I'm not sure about that.
(And, of course, don't get me started about their search feature,
which is maddeningly inconsistent, sometimes working and sometimes
not. I'm grateful that at least they're *trying* to provide a
valuable resource -- a comprehensive Usenet archive -- but why
the interface seems so, um, imperfect .... )
