🚀 go-pugleaf

On 3/18/2017 6:34 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 06:33:42 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
>> <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>>> You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>>
>> I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?
>
> They use Google Groups.
>
> Google Groups, among other things, contains an archive of all Usenet
> posts (well, big-8 newsgroups anyway) and has a Usenet gateway. What
> it does not have is a very good interface that makes it evident that
> some of these posts are five, ten, or twenty years old. So people
> start reading some of these older groups - often re-directed there by
> a search query - and think the comments are new, and respond as they
> would to any new post, unaware that they are necro-posting.
>
> Google is aware of the problem (I am sure I am not the only one to
> have sent them an email about the issue) but apparently refuses to do
> anything with it. I wish they'd give the Usenet archive to somebody
> like archive.org and then kill their usenet gateway entirely, since it
> just causes confusion.
>
> With that said, I think the better option is not to chastise
> googlegroups posters for their error but instead welcome them to the
> group, try to answer their question, and only then explain the problem
> (and possible solutions). Snarky answers just sour them on the Usenet
> experience and we could use all the traffic we can get here ;-)
>
> And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
> buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
> it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
> get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
> fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
> its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible, or
> just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
> feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
> Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs.
>
> They've gotten a lot better about it, though; Skyrim still had a lot
> of bugs but most of them were fairly minor in comparison. You could
> actually finish the game without it crashing on you! l-)
>
> Anyway, to the original googlegroups poster, welcome to Usenet; thanks
> for your "insightful" comment (hey, some snarky is expected as part of
> the usenet experience). As noted, you are responding to a 21 year old
> post but that's not your fault. However, in future you may be better
> of using a proper Usenet client and provider; I recommend
> http://www.eternal-september.org/ (it's free!). Also, you're likely to
> find more traffic on c.s.i.p.rpg's sister newsgroup,
> comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (which, despite its name, accepts
> discussion on all genres of game, not just action titles)

The funny thing is for awhile they had a policy that wouldn't let you 
post to a thread that was started more than 30 days ago.  With the 
length of some of the threads that was pretty limiting, I complained 
about it, and amazingly within a couple months they changed it back. 
Perhaps they got a lot of complaints about that.  Perhaps something more 
reasonable like can't reply to a *post* that's more than a year old 
would be better.

I actually like using GG for reading/posting as it keeps track across 
multiple devices what I've read.  The tree function isn't very good, and 
it's got some format issues that make it hard for some people to read 
and it actually listens to archive request so I wasn't seeing Zag's 
posts so I finally got around to getting a newsreader set up again, and 
instead use remote desktop to go to where I have it set up, which is 
still a bit less convenient.

- Justisaur