I've done this with my own scripts for eBay (to improve their search engine) and for Yahoo Groups (which hobbles a perfectly fine NNTP model with advertising, lack of threading, and slow HTTP retrieval). You code in your interests, and just key a simple shell command to have your pertinent info retrieved for you, instead of all the tedious pointing and clicking.
Yahoo Groups is the absolute worst, but it is free and people are seduced to use it. Yahoo Groups is to Usenet as AOL is to a real ISP.
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I've done this with my own scripts for eBay (to improve their search engine) and for Yahoo Groups (which hobbles a perfectly fine NNTP model with advertising, lack of threading, and slow HTTP retrieval). You code in your interests, and just key a simple shell command to have your pertinent info retrieved for you, instead of all the tedious pointing and clicking. Yahoo Groups is the absolute worst, but it is free and people are seduced to use it. Yahoo Groups is to Usenet as AOL is to a real ISP.