[OT] Google Groups posters, please read

[Paul Lalli]

I'm taking this directly from Google Groups's own FAQ pages
(http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12348&topic=
108):

===================

What's good 'netiquette' when posting to Usenet?

Summarize what you're following up.

When you click 'Reply' under 'show options' to follow up an existing
article, Google Groups includes the full article in quotes, with the
cursor at the top of the article. Tempting though it is to just start
typing your message, please STOP and do two things first. Look at the
quoted text and remove parts that are irrelevant. Then, go to the BOTTOM
of the article and start typing there. Doing this makes it much easier
for your readers to get through your post. They'll have a reminder of
the relevant text before your comment, but won't have to re-read the
entire article. And if your reply appears on a site before the original
article does, they'll get the gist of what you're talking about.

===================

Recently, this newsgroup has seen a deluge of Google Groups posters who
apparently don't read or ignore Google Groups's own advice. I would
encourage all Usenet regulars who become annoyed at this tendency to
refer the offenders to this policy.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Lalli

 

[Tassilo v. Parseval]

Also sprach Paul Lalli:

Recently, this newsgroup has seen a deluge of Google Groups posters who
apparently don't read or ignore Google Groups's own advice. I would
encourage all Usenet regulars who become annoyed at this tendency to
refer the offenders to this policy.

Or even simpler:

[*]
Score: =-9999
%Expires:
User-Agent: G2/0\.2
%EOS

Postings made via google will end up in malformatted code snippets
anyway, so I don't see any reason why I should not killfile them,
regardless of netiquette.

Tassilo

 

[Tad McClellan]

/me awaits the subsequent deluge of "You're not the boss of me!" posts.

That would be fine with me.

There are too many posts here to read everybody's anyway.

 

[Tassilo v. Parseval]

Also sprach Abigail:

Tassilo v. Parseval ([email protected]) wrote on
MMMMCLXXIII September MCMXCIII in <URL:news:[email protected]>:

@@ [*]
@@ Score: =-9999
@@ %Expires:
@@ User-Agent: G2/0\.2
@@ %EOS
@@
@@ Postings made via google will end up in malformatted code snippets
@@ anyway, so I don't see any reason why I should not killfile them,
@@ regardless of netiquette.


Same here, except that my entry reads:

[*]
Score:: -9999
[ 656 lines deleted ]
Organization: http://groups\.google\.com

I still have the hope that one day google will fix the indentation of
postings in which case they'd bump up the version number to 0.3 so I
would see these postings again. If they don't fix that in 0.3, I'd have
to adjust the scorefile entry accordingly, of course.

Tassilo

 

[Chris Mattern]

For the record, I'm really happy when I'm wrong on these sorts of
predictions. Keep it up!

You DO realize that it just means the lusers never
bothered to read the message at all, right?

--
Christopher Mattern

"Which one you figure tracked us?"
"The ugly one, sir."
"...Could you be more specific?"

 

[ioneabu]

Recently, this newsgroup has seen a deluge of Google Groups posters
who

apparently don't read or ignore Google Groups's own advice. I would
encourage all Usenet regulars who become annoyed at this tendency to
refer the offenders to this policy.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Lalli

I find it hard to believe that Google, being a company whose only
products are software, and it's main piece of software a web based
search engine, has not leveraged the power of Perl in some way. If
that is the case, you would think that someone with some influence
there has read postings from c.l.p.m and would have addressed the
problem of mangled code and maybe even responded officially or even
anonymously to why the interface is not Perl-friendly. Then again,
maybe they have. Maybe some regular posters here work for or have
worked for Google.

What is the best alternative as far as news reading software? I have
not yet used any that I am as happy with as Google as far as keeping up
with old threads and relevant threads.

I tried a current version of rn but found it to be a little complex,
like learning vi from scratch. I tried writing my own Perl solution,
which was great at reading the new posts as they came in, but I found
that writing a decent interface for following threads was too much for
me.

Thanks for any suggestions.

wana

 

[Arndt Jonasson]

I find it hard to believe that Google, being a company whose only
products are software, and it's main piece of software a web based
search engine, has not leveraged the power of Perl in some way. If
that is the case, you would think that someone with some influence
there has read postings from c.l.p.m and would have addressed the
problem of mangled code and maybe even responded officially or even
anonymously to why the interface is not Perl-friendly. Then again,
maybe they have. Maybe some regular posters here work for or have
worked for Google.

What is the best alternative as far as news reading software? I have
not yet used any that I am as happy with as Google as far as keeping up
with old threads and relevant threads.

I tried a current version of rn but found it to be a little complex,
like learning vi from scratch.

I use 'gnus' in Emacs.

 

[mjl69]

I tried a current version of rn but found it to be a little complex,
like learning vi from scratch. I tried writing my own Perl solution,
which was great at reading the new posts as they came in, but I found
that writing a decent interface for following threads was too much for
me.

Thanks for any suggestions.

wana

I wrote a fairly simple set of scripts that use Net:NNTP to post my message. If I am replying, I cut and past from Google.
Do 'Show Options' and then 'Show Original' and cut & paste the message to file 'in.news'. Then this script to format:

#!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe

use strict;
use warnings;

my ($mid, $ref, $ng, $sub) = ('','','','');
my @bod;
open my $in, '<', './in.news';
my $fr = 'mjl69 <[email protected]>';
while (<$in>)
{
if (/^message.*?id:\s*(.*)/i) {$mid = $1}
if (/^references:\s*(.*)/i) {$ref = $1}
if (/^newsgroups:\s*(.*)/i) {$ng = $1}
if (/^subject:\s*(.*)/i) {$sub = $1}
#if (not /^\S+:\s*.*/i) {push @bod, $_}
last if /^\s*$/;
}
push @bod, $_ while (<$in>);
close $in;
if ($mid)
{
if ($sub !~ /re:/i) {$sub = 'Re: '.$sub}
$ref = $ref.' '.$mid;
s/^(.*)/> $1/ for @bod;
}
unshift @bod, "References: $ref\n\n\n";
unshift @bod, "Subject: $sub\n";
unshift @bod, "Newsgroups: $ng\n";
unshift @bod, "From: $fr\n";
die "error: no subject" if not $sub;
open $in, '>', './in.news';
print $in $_ for @bod;

and then this script to send after editing 'in.news' with my response:

#!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::NNTP;

my $nntp = Net::NNTP->new("your.news.server");
$nntp->authinfo ( 'xxxx','xxxx');
my ($mid, $ref, $ng, $sub) = ('','','','');
my @bod;
open my $in, '<', './in.news';
my @out = <$in>;
print "success!\n" if $nntp->post(@out);

$nntp->quit;

I'm sure there are a million better ways to do it, but it works for me.

mjl