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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.
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=
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.
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
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 ).
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.
Don't know if you noticed, but /. ate the email addresses you tried to embed inside angle brackets in your post.