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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 can't believe that you removed a FREE service that I liked and used and replaced it with another FREE service with lesser features... I'm sure you will release the old service as a pay service... how DARE you try and make money...
signed... disgruntled freeloader.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
... date limited searches are back on the "Advanced Search" page! Woohoo! That was the show stopper for me. Other than that, its nearly all cosmetic changes, and I don't care about those.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
That of all the tech companies plying their wares on the web, Google is one of the few that actively listens to complaints and at least in some measure, acts on them.
The new interface is horrible. Is there any technical reason why Google can't provide a 'Classic' view? Is the underlying data going to be that different? It's going to have to show the old, archived data still, which it obviously can with both the old and new systems. So why not continue to offer it?
Failing that, is there another way to look search/view the old Usenet archive?
Thanks to some drunken post-hockey game USENET posting a couple years back, I was really hoping they'd come up with something a lot worse. Hate to retire the email address, but I guess it's either that or live with those posts forever. (Oh, and of course the worst of what I wrote was replied back to me by someone else so I can't unpost it)
I wonder - am I alone in seeing the "Google Groups 2" as a significant improvement on the original?
I like the improved 'posting' speed; I love the 'starred topics' (Though I remain sceptical that the 'new posts' feature works properly - I keep thinking "new since when?"). I like the idea that a thread has become the notional unit searched in the new UI - Google Groups 2 far better suits my needs.
- groups.google.com goes to the original interface, not to the beta.
- Following a link to the beta shows that you can now easily search a date range.
Not that Hemos could have, you know, looked before posting this...What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If you read it, it looks like they are really aiming it at the LCD, with key segments like:
Then again, most press releases are written with their intended audience being 6-year olds. "Ford Motor Company Inc. makes cars! Vroom vrooom! Beep beep! Ford cars!"
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Unfortunately, as of December 5th, Google Groups Beta is back and you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore. just visit any regional Google Groups, like groups.google.ch and you can still use the old interface.
Can some please translate the summary to English for me? I can't understand a thing from the summary. The summary says "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups" but "you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore". What the hell is there then? Two monkeys and a flying squirell? Plus, when I go to groups.google.com I see the original Google Groups - contradicting the summary. What am I missing here?
These changes have completely fscked up links to usenet posts. A web page I know of that documents a lawsuit (won't post here since I don't want it to get slashdotted) provided links to relevant usenet posts. It now points instead to completely different unrelated posts in other newsgroups.
a n_638071147 used to point to a post in news.admin.net-abuse.email. It now redirects for me to http://groups-beta.google.com/group/it.discussioni .auto/browse_thread/thread/dadced92c14aee94?ic=1 which points to an article in it.discussioni.auto. So Google seems to think there's some sort of correlation between news.admin.net-abuse.email and Italian car discussions???
For example, the link http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&ic=1&selm=
This probably isn't enough for a story, but Google finally has translation support for Eastern languages... I've tested Japanese, Chinese and Korean. They seem to be a lot like Systran's (babelfish) translations, but not exactly.
You may mod me offtopic now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you don't like the new itnerface, just use it with a country code domain rather than .com. I've checked the UK, Canadian, French, German, and Australian versions, and all have the classic interface, rather than the new one.
Well I am using it as a mailing list and it works well and better than yahoogroups lately though most of yahoo's problems with some ISPs have been resolved.
However does the Moderation work yet?
I tried to setup an announcement list where the members can make announcements which would be moderated. I attempted to send message that required moderation and was able to moderate the message. No email no mention of the queued messages on the site. Nothing. As such we are still using yahoogroups for that list.
You can subscribe to Usenet groups and get all the postings to your email address.
There's an Atom feed file for every group.
The about page for each group has group archives available by year and month.
I think once (if) I get used to the new interface this new Google Groups could be very nice indeed.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I was wondering what the original post and this one was talking about until I realised that I am in canada and am automatically redirected to the google.ca page. groups.google.ca still has the old interface
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Perhaps there is some confusion over the fact that the link "Groups" from the main Google pages now points at the beta. However if one goes to "groups.google.com" directly, you see the same old interface and merely a link inviting you to try the beta if you like.
I happen to have been doing some research all last week and this weekend on groups.google.com and have not noticed any strange changes at all. Sounds to me like they just changed a link on their front page to drive traffic to the beta, big deal?
I really wish they hadn't. It would be nice at least to have a second source. Of course they would have had to eventually limit searches on binary groups they offered, but it was a sad day when they dropped it altogether.
Altavista advanced search capabilities always seemed far more advanced than Google, even now. For example, how, again, in google can I search for an article where a specific word is near another specific word (within n words), to avoid all the false matches of composite content? Google seems to spend most of its efforts determining where 80% would like to go relative to a particular topic rather than any degree of accuracy.
Am I blind, or is there really no way to get a threaded view of the headers? The flat view useless.
However, the deep link you get now is a Google article number, similar to the DejaNews article numbers -- which no longer work of course. The old Google deep links encoded the MsgID directly in the URL, thus guarateeing their usefulness in the future.
OK, before anyone else posts ill-informed rubbish, please go back and read the previous thread, where this argument was done to death. For those who can't be bothered, here's the executive summary:
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search it's just right there at the bottom of the form. So for me all this whining around is quite senseless. Without this date-search, google groups would indeed be completely useless (who is interested in answers to tech-questions asked around 1990?) Philip
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
I use Google Groups all the time - never did search by date so I don't care about that. I like the new UI.
:-)
I used to go to a lot of trouble handling NNTP feeds; since Google Groups was released I don't bother.
A little bit OT: Is it just me, or are some things getting simpler? GMail and Google Groups cuts down my 'overhead time'. The switch from Linux (well, sometimes Windows 2000) to Mac OS X saves me a lot of admin hours each month. The quality and productivity of coding tools (e.g., IntelliJ and LispWorks) is going through the roof: everything seems to be getting easier
I really don't like it when the text for a link doesn't match the target. If you see
e ct ronics.sonystyle.com/m..."
"http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/m..."
and then notice that its really
"http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://sonyel
it makes you wonder what use they have planned for those click histories ( tied into those cookies ).
...its lack of features (date searches)...
l =en) appears to have date searches. Or was the previous date searching better?
Advanced Groups Search (http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?h
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.
I sure wish I could use Google Groups to post using an alternate email address. The interface forces me to use my primary gmail account. As far as I can tell, the only way around this is to create a second Google account, which forces me to log out of gmail...hassle.
If they want to limit me to threads, then I want to be able to add the number of replies and authors per thread to my search.
Eliminating threads that have 1 message/0 replies would make finding things MUCH faster. Right now I find tons of threads that are people asking the same question, and not very many where someone provided an answer.
Didn't some student not too long ago research what made a "good newsgroup"? They should put his research into the search parameters somewhow.
Don't know if you noticed, but /. ate the email addresses you tried to embed inside angle brackets in your post.
Back in the mid to late 90's I was using the Usenet groups a lot to ask about and research programming questions. I found it was a great source of information and it was an invaluable tool for me at work. The last few years I've noticed a trend where find almost everything I'm looking for programming-wise under a normal Google search before I find it in the groups (if I can find it all in the groups). I could be completely wrong about this but it appears from my perspective that Usenet is going the way of BBSes in light of all the specialized message boards with Google indexed content on the web. Maybe Google is just helping put the final nail in the coffin for a dying Usenet instead of actively killing the newsgroups.
is the lack of seeing "sub-groups" within a group, ie, when i research C# stuff for mono, I look in
microsoft.public.dotnet
and in that group, at the top, each subgroup within that group was listed; now, most of the time, when new groups were added, i would see the newer groups there, etc. Also, it was great for navigating through the group "tree". Usually, in a large group with a lot of subgroups, i link to the main group trunk, and then go from there when i am looking for something. From this standpoint, this isnt one step back in usability, its three steps back. I hope this isnt a sign of things to come from google, because quite honestly, its pretty lazy in terms of design and testing. Its like removing the "Refresh" button from firefox when that feature has already become a staple of web browser interfaces.
/rant
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.
The first page looks like the original but if you search you are in the new interface - no choice.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating