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Google Flips Back to Groups Beta (Again)
afabbro writes "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups within 24 hours of making it mandatory for all users. You may recall that its lack of features (date searches), unwanted features (e-mail masking), and clunky user interface met with a very chilly reception here. Unfortunately, as of December 5th, Google Groups Beta is back and you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore. Be sure to share your opinion with Google."
What would be so bad about Email masking?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I think it's clear that when you post something to Usenet, you understand that it will be copied, without any further permission requested from you, onto news servers and to news clients around the world. If someone doesn't like that, they shouldn't have posted - they have no right to tell Google whether or not they can charge people for their interface (one of many) to access the newsgroups. (Obviously, one can only licence their own copyrights, so I'm not saying you can share other people's copyrighted stuff.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You are not alone. The old interface seemed anything but "wonderful" to me, especially with its truncation of long posts -- as soon as you started to read anything with a bunch of quoted text, the amount of clicking and scrolling got insane. Now they've added "hide quoted text" and "show quoted text" links, and the whole "read more..." business seems to be a thing of the past (though I haven't poked around enough to be completely sure of that).
Also: when viewing a group summary, clicking "view titles only" gives you something similar to the previous interface.
When viewing a thread "view as tree" brings back the old interface for all intents and purposes.
When viewing a message, clicking "show options" allows you to get at an unmasked email address (assuming the poster used one to begin with) and original header.
Finally, the "old" interface is still very much available. It's at http://groups.google.com
Conclusion: this Slashdot story is a big unnecessary whinge.
Remember, Google purchased the archive from another party. They didn't have to take on the responsibility.
Am I blind, or is there really no way to get a threaded view of the headers? The flat view useless.
Ah, but are the websites you create archives of useful information such as google groups? Also, you may not care about maintaining consistancy and just letting other peoples' links to your work die, but if you want repeat users, then constancy and link permanance could be a good thing, no?
Additionally, as a web developer one does not *have* to be nice and considerate of others, BUT being nice and considerate is a good and polite thing to be. :-)
I hate the new proportional font they adopted for messages. Usenet is meant to be looked at in a fixed-width font! Proportional fonts totally screw up lovingly crafted sigs, ascii art, and so on.
Who was the nutcase at Google that thought Groups needed a facelift? It was FINE AS IT WAS. I don't know what they're smoking over there.
I'm going to use the Canadian Google Groups (google.ca) in defiance for now, but I bet it will go away soon as well.
Arrrgh. Companies can't just leave a good thing alone.
-Z
If you don't agree with the terms of the RFC, don't post on Usenet. It's as simple as that. By posting, you're implicitly giving every single person in the world with an NNTP server the right to distribute and store your articles for as long as they want.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Sure, but for how long? After they've settled down with the American version, they'll translate it and fuck up the others too.
And people keep saying "Click on options" to do this or that. IT DOESN'T WORK IN MY BROWSER.
Warning: I go off the deep end on this subject. But I'm sincere for all of that.
DejaNews is more important for our society than the Human Genome Project. Just because only Slashdot-types (mostly) understand that doesn't make it less factual. It's wrong to leave it in the hands of one company.
I recently retrieved all articles in Google Groups posted using either of the four e-mail addresses I remember having used for Usenet (there were 429 such articles, posted between 1985 and 1997). I never mangled my e-mail address on purpose, but I had mostly stopped posting to Usenet when spamming took off in the mid 90's. Those four addresses have since all been disabled, although I tried to keep them alive as long as possible, as a matter of principle (I preferred using blacklists to silence annoying senders rather than give up my freedom to express myself in public for the convenience of spammers).
Google not only masks the address of each poster, but also anything in the article itself that merely looks like an e-mail address, including Message IDs. When I quote somebody else, referring to the author of that quote by name and e-mail address, Google sees fit to remove that identifying information. I did not approve of them mangling my articles in this way; that was not part of the understanding of how my postings were to be processed when I made them.
Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others. I'm perfectly happy with Google or anyone else archiving my articles for future readers, as long as they don't modify what I have written. If someone wants to quote a significant portion of an article rather than all of it, that's fine too, as long as they attribute it to the original author, but that's not an archive, and that's not what Google is doing. Instead, Google is systematically erasing information detailing exactly who wrote what part of each article. What if an e-mail address is used as the sole identifier of the author in an explicit copyright notice, will Google destroy that information too?
As for Google allowing individual authors to opt out from having their articles archived at all, that's fine but it's no excuse for systematic copyright infringement, however small. To make a rough analogy, that's like Napster allowing copyright holders to request their own titles to be removed from Napster's database on an individual basis, while continuing to distribute anything the copyright holders haven't complained about (maybe because they haven't found out about it). For distribution to be legal, copyright requires authors to opt in to it, not fail to opt out. If authors want to opt out from enforcing their rights, they do so by neglecting to sue.
I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of what I once wrote. Google however does not provide me with that option. Should I really have to send Google 429 removal requests, and then submit my articles to some other public archive, just to make that point? What a waste.
OK, before anyone else posts ill-informed rubbish
You're going to beat us to it, just like in the previous thread. Some specific points are brought up below.
2. "The system" of usenet is a system where it is left undefined what the client is that is viewing the posts. When I posted some of my first usenet posts, Microsoft did not have a usenet reader yet. Now they do. Does that mean I can complain that users have no right to use Outlook's news reader to access posts I made back then? No, of course not. Now, what is the definitional, legally enforcable difference between (A) Using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to the user directly, and (B) using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to a web browser that shows them to the user? The fact that it shunts through a web browser on the way to the user's eyeballs doesn't really change anything about the setup of who's showing things to who under what rights.
3. There is no hard and fast definition that separates a cache from an archive. An archive is exactly the same thing as a cache with a lot of space and is slow to purge. Therefore if permission is given to cache usenet posts (which it obviously is since that's how it works) then permission is also being given to archive them. The only way to refute this is to come up with a rigid legalistic definition of what the difference between a cache that is open to the public and an archive that is open to the public is.
And note that a usenet news server can legally be open to the public to connect to (and some were, once upon a time when usenet was smaller and cheaper to spool). So that's not a difference either between the usenet system before and after dejajnews/google got into it.
(By the way, posts do NOT "normally" expire after several days. They "normally" expire whenever the local news spool admin damn well feels like making them expire - which is a function of disk space mostly. I've participated in groups where the posts were archived for many months back on the server run by the ISP. How long they take to expire can be set on a per-group basis too - basically it varies from one group to the next even on the same news spool.)
5. The problem is that you have still failed to show the legal difference between what google is doing and what a news server is allowed to do. Therefore the "onus" on Google, while it is true that it exists, is already satisfied by simply pointing out that it is in the exact same legal position as a news server, which is already permitted to do what it does.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I never realized how much I used this feature until it was gone -
Sometimes if I see that a certain author has a lot of insight about the group topic, I search only his/her posts for a given subject, to see what they've had to say about it in the past.
Now with masking, I can't just click on an author's name and get a listing of just their posts, or do an advanced search by author.
Plus the new interface is just busy clunky - apparently they're forgetting one thing that makes Google so nice to use - simplicity of interfaces.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.