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Old July 20th 10, 10:52 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
ContestID67[_2_]
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Posts: 202
Default Getting tired of The DigiWX posts

So to give more details on what Bob K says, Google is just how you are
looking at the Rec (recreation) Aviation Soaring (RAS) content. This
is not a Google hosted group. Network News Groups are the great grand
daddy of true Google (or Yahoo) owned groups. The original blog!

Network News Groups are hosted in the Internet "cloud" within
thousands of individual servers, they don't really exist in any single
place and isn't controlled or owned by any single organization. It is
(was) a beautiful communal thing.

An analogy to Network News Groups might be a telephone party line in
which anyone can say anything at any time and no one can block what
anyone else says and no one owns or approves who says what. All you
can do is hang up if you don't like the "content".
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.aviation.soaring is the "handset"
you use to listen to what people have to say. True Google or Yahoo
owned groups are typically moderated so you can kick off someone who
you don't want.

Actually, RAS is pretty clean as network news groups go. Many groups
have simply died because 100% of the content is SPAM because it is so
very easy to SPAM and so difficult to prevent it (a real moving
target). Someone told me that 80% of all Internet traffic is SPAM (I
wonder that amount of SPAM actually is productive). Very sad. Get a
life.

So what you need is a better "handset". Instead of using Google via a
web browser to read network news, you need to use a dedicated piece of
free software like XNews. This "handset" can turn off specific people
on the party line by keying off of particular works like "Nike" or
"DigiWX" (which would have blocked this RAS post).

So what network news readers do people use? What public network news
server do you use?